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Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

Late last month, Pope Francis met with charismatic Christian and Pentecostal leaders at the Vatican, including prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a popular American religious figure whose theology and lifestyle is directly at odds with the Pope’s. The meeting was not the humble Pope’s first encounter with the self-anointed bishops of bling. In February, he recorded a video message for a Copeland conference, in which he called for u…

Normalization is Control: Telling Stories to Survive

By Mariam Durrani

…for myself, my family, and colleagues. So I’ve been trying to draft a short 800-word article for Religion Dispatches, as my attempt to make sense of this current moment, not because I chose this as an anthropological project, but here I am. Here I am listening to Trump’s transition team drop words like Muslim registry or that there is a precedent for internment camps in American history. The news that the KKK has been dropping their newsletter off…

Gay Marriage to End “Culture Wars”?

By Bill Berkowitz

…n staunchly opposed to allowing gays and lesbians to marry, and increasing numbers of Republicans and white evangelicals say that gay marriage will be very important in their voting decisions.” A Pew Research Center survey conducted after the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage found that 49% of Americans said they oppose allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, while 38% favored gay marriages. In July 2004, 56% opposed…

Partisanship Is The New Civil Religion

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…rtisan politics. The devotional speaker who had been invited to address the 800-plus crowd that evening spoke mainly about the need for Christians to think and act “eschatologically,” orienting their practices always to their vision of ultimate reconciliation which is portrayed as the eschatological banquet of God. Then she used an example to drive the radical nature of Christian reconciliation home to her audience. She was born and raised a Democ…

The Feds: Gamblers And Addicts

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ss federal mandates. The Centers for Disease Control, for instance, have a number of relatively small field stations, research facilities coordinating work on malaria and other blood-borne diseases. In the absence of a coherent alternative, they were ordered to become AIDS research labs as well. A great deal of the initial outlays went into converting relatively small field stations into much larger research laboratories called upon to expand thei…

Don’t Blame Black Voters: The Obama Non-Effect

By Jonathan L. Walton

…nce of these demographics on the state electorate in relation to the small number of African Americans, it is inconceivable to argue that African Americans are to blame. The fault lines of a progressive coalition to resist Prop. 8 were seemingly regional and religious as opposed to racially determined. Do Black Folks Need an Elton John? Scapegoating black folks is descriptively flawed because it pits a racial group against a multiracial reality. B…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my…

The Lady Vanishes: Trump’s Communications Team Tries to Topple a Monument

By Spencer Dew

…sion with his own person image, as in the recently released transcripts of phone calls with Mexico and Australia, is all too apparent as a dominant and guiding focus) or a problem with those picked to actually “communicate” on behalf of the White House (from a Press Secretary who hid “among” bushes and banned cameras from press conferences to a Director of Communications who, in the early and yet also late days of his short-lived job accused one u…

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…o a local electronics store to get the ubiquitous, and indispensable, cell phone, when I was approached by a Libyan customer. After learning that I was an American he said “Thank you for helping liberate my country from the dreaded dictator, Gaddafi. May he burn in hell! And as for those who killed your ambassador, may they burn in hell with him!” “They are a disgrace,” he said of the makers of the inflammatory video, “but they are not the cause…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…te segregation and economic favoritism. When I spoke with Rothstein on the phone, he underscored the long-term effects of this last policy. During the 1940s and 1950s, suburban subdivisions were built in St. Louis, and throughout the country, using federal loans stipulating that no homes be sold to African Americans. Priced at about $125,000 in today’s dollars, these were affordable—with a mortgage—to working class families, black or white. Yet bl…