Religion Dispatches
…a First Lady.” Here was McCain, the angry old warrior, deploying sex as a central political weapon to recharge his potency, his party’s fortunes and the cultural oomph of the right. Not gender. The Republicans didn’t need just any woman to compete with Obama for the Wow factor, the Mmm factor, the stable, loving family factor. It is a calculated bonus that adherents can now speak loftily of making history, but for different reasons, drawing deep…
Read More…the war. In 2006, the United Church of Christ tried to buy television ads promoting religious diversity under the rubric “God is Still Speaking”; NBC and CBS refused to accept them. No doubt mainline leaders are less organized and more demoralized than one might wish; they play their role in a downward spiral involving power, morale, and cultural salience. Sullivan has a good eye for anecdotes that dramatize these problems (and deepen the ruts in…
Read More…here the experience of military service is nearly universal and culturally central, the films’ focus on émigrés (sometimes pejoratively called yoredim, “those who go down”) suggests not all is well with Zionism. Post-Zionism, a term made familiar in the 1990s by Israeli intellectuals, was denounced by some after the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the term continues to describe a range of positions in Israeli culture and politics. Sociologist U…
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…and Parsley are trotted out as shining examples of Christian leadership by Republican politicians, their critics often define them by their easily documented diatribes against Satan, the liberal media, other religions, or even witchcraft. Hagee, as founder of the Christian Zionist group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), is associated with his efforts to inject his eschatology into Washington’s foreign policy debate, with his calls for a preempt…
Read More…were pulled in by the traditional values rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and his Republican friends. Unmoved by this mass defection, Democrats then ushered Catholics out. At the nub of these shifts was the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, that legalized abortion. Abortion would become central to the politics of the next three decades; the beating heart of the Right’s crusade for traditional values and the cherished prize of feminists and the Le…
Read More…vangelicals and other serious religious people will not automatically vote Republican. What is omitted from this scenario, often so pleasing to liberals and progressives, is a woman’s right to make decisions about her body. Abortion rights is talked about as an unfortunate issue that they wish were not there. As a point of fact, these more moderate evangelical leaders are still opposed to a woman’s right to choose. On the night before the 2004 ele…
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…of that Zionism is no more, having been supplanted, as Israel turns toward free-market capitalism and a bourgeois society, by what I suggest we call “Settler Zionism.” Devoutly religious in tenor and practice, Settler Zionism is founded on the principle that the Land of Israel (its exact contours defined by rabbinic interpretation of the biblical boundaries) is promised to the Jews and that relinquishing land to gentiles, even under the auspices o…
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…sponses ranging from simple re-postings to a response entitled “atheism is freedom.” Not to be left out, the more traditional news media in the United States and beyond took up the topic as well; from Texas to India and back to New Hampshire, the notion that college major and religiosity are linked seemed to require attention. A lot of attention. Of course, all this probably resulted from the well-executed press release issued by the University of…
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…he very palace where the Capitoline collection was housed. The idea was to promote the fine arts, by providing a space in which contemporary artists could sketch the naked human form, both from Classical statues and live models. But that was all taking place near the old Roman Forum, the heart of the ancient profane city on the other side of town from the sanctity of Saint Peter’s. Less than a decade later in 1761, Benedict’s successor, Clement X…
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…year’s fantastic Moon. b) Afterlife: A belief in some sort of afterlife is central to many religions and it may have been pivotal in the origins of religions in the first place. How will this play out on Caprica, where the boundaries between what is alive and what is not are already getting quite blurry? Does it shape monotheism or polytheism in a particular direction? In addition to all this, we have the monomania (as Diane calls it) of Daniel Gr…
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