Religion Dispatches
…ncome every year, but they own about 40 percent of the total wealth of the United States. Wealth in a democratic society creates enormous political power. In 1976, the wealthiest one percent of Americans received about seven percent of the nation’s annual income. By 2007, that figure had gone up to twenty-four percent going to the wealthiest one percent. How did that happen? Is it because the wealthiest worked really hard from 1976 to 2007 while t…
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…at much of the work attributed to celebrity figures in the Christian world today is not their own. But the glaring fact remains that plagiarism is a very serious offense that in non-evangelical settings often results in loss of employment. Yes, in secular circles, author/speakers with star power like Fareed Zakaria can emerge from a plagiarism scandal with their gigs intact. However, even Zakaria was given a one month suspension from Time and CNN,…
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…ughout his campaign, often more dramatically than he did with Christianity Today. Just last month, in an address at Liberty University, Carson inveighed against the secular progressives “who are trying to push God out of our lives.” “Let me tell you,” Carson continued, “our nation’s survival as the pinnacle nation in the world…is rooted in our values system, the values and principles that made us into a great nation. And the real question is: Are…
Read More…tional relations. The book is a study of recent state-sponsored efforts to promote religious freedom, religious engagement, and the rights of religious minorities. It brings together the study of contemporary religion and global politics in a new way, charting the lives of these projects in specific contexts and developing a critique of their consequences. Uncovering and exploring the gap between the religion that is promoted through these efforts…
Read More…between the tall trees. Or perhaps he (using the gender ascription of the Arabic, since pronouns are arbitrary functionaries of language anyway) had already set for the night. I will need to look for him where I last saw him, and when I last saw him: on this road toward the mosque, in the evening around tarawih time. I have my flashlight handy because once I past the community kitchen, the darkness is overwhelming. But I only need it for a short…
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…rsalism. This popular history underscores continuities between the work of today’s human rights defenders and previous citizens’ struggles for the rights of women, workers, immigrants, and formerly enslaved and colonized peoples, placing Malala Yousafzai shoulder to shoulder with Frederick Douglass and Mary Wollstonecraft. In Moyn’s narrative, human rights are no older than Generation X. The eighteenth century discourse of droits de l’homme or “ri…
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…generation of my own children. “The primary issue in the Christian church today is to get away from original sin and to see the story of Jesus not as saving the sinful but as expanding their humanity.” Most of my controversy came from my fight for the rights of gays and lesbians. Once I was convinced of the holiness of gays and lesbians, I ordained the first openly gay man with a partner in 1989. That’s a long time ago in this battle. It was cove…
Read More…will judge us all very, very harshly. I think the people who vote for this today, and in the future… will on this issue, not be so proud and there may be some justifiable shame there as well.” The attempt to shame marriage equality opponents in the present is a sore point for people like Maggie Gallagher at the National Organization for Marriage who complained they are being painted as a “bigot who is opposed to interracial marriage.” The fact tha…
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…of progress. “I’m deeply encouraged by the movement made in the Convention today,” lawyer, abuse survivor and SBC advisor Rachael Denhollander told the Houston Chronicle. “Ed Litton’s character and positions give me hope that significant positive change is possible for the denomination.” Indeed, Litton agreed to an independent audit of the SBC’s handling of sexual abuse issues, a move Southern Baptist author and speaker Daniel Darling lauded in hi…
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…long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction. As Joanna Brooks has noted in these pages, the New York Times recently featured Harold Bloom’s musings on how a President Romney would govern a country, and a planet, from which he would in the afterlife depart, becoming th…
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