Religion Dispatches
…Back from my Bloggingheads hiatus, I talk with Get Religion’s Mollie Hemingway about whether Mitt Romney’s plan to discuss his Mormonism tonight at the Republican National Convention benefit his candidacy: And we also discussed the significance of the fact that Barack Obama is the only Protestant on both presidential tickets: …
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…as exploding from the guitars. Bono wailed “shots rang out in the Memphis sky” while a montage of Martin Luther King, Jr., flashed in the background, and the subtle reminder that white supremacy killed a preacher and a prophet has me feeling the Spirit. Then 60,000 white people screamed at Bono’s pandering, “America! You are the Dream!” Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop wondering how many of them were updating their status to “MLK never blocked traffic!”…
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…he surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive.” Silence from the cacophony of networking is exactly what he’ll have soon—we should all be so lucky. This difficult relationship of the Church to technology has dogged Benedict from the very beginning of a tenure in which he’s had to oversee an avalanche of change that was only hinted at when he was selected. The previous pontiff, Pope John Paul II, saw the creation of the Vatican’s website in 1994…
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…ine is an event co-sponsor—no small potatoes considering the mainstream cachet of Jim Wallis, the founder /editor of Sojourners and author of the chart burner, God’s Politics. And McLaren has friends outside the faith box too. The Sierra Club is signed up. You tell me the last time people paid for tickets to a preacher-meets-politico-meets-tree-hugger event. Observing, then, the McLaren-brand machine gurgling and chirping right along, a fair quest…
Read More…can’t find any job; among younger males, especially African-Americans, the number is much higher—in many areas one in two workers is without work. Yet Congress, with a Democratic majority, can’t get it together to extend unemployment benefits. Our solons just flew out of town for a weeklong holiday vacation. Republicans, joined by Democratic deficit hawks, insist that any extension be “deficit neutral” and come out of unspent stimulus money. But…
Read More…tent with his or her gender identity. After the city attorney ruled that many of the signatures collected for the referendum petition were invalid, the petitioners no longer had the requisite number of signatures to place the referendum on the ballot. The subpoenas, served on pastors who are not litigants in the lawsuit, seek a broad range of documents and communications, including sermons, regarding their statements on homosexuality, the Houston…
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…based community organizing is neither a new phenomenon nor a rare one, so any discussion of faith-based social service delivery by either political party must include community organizers. Saul Alinsky initiated the idea of faith-based community organizing in the 1930s, challenging people in impoverished urban areas to address their neighborhoods’ various socioeconomic and crime-related challenges themselves — in partnership with local religious l…
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…l church, beginning in Rome, owes reparations? I do not see signs of them anywhere, nor do I expect to any time soon. Opus Dei is not a clothing line, but a deeply ideological Catholic group that stands for very conservative religious values. Rachel Maddow was not tapped for the media job for a reason. Granted nine months is a short gestation even for a newbie pope. But waiting quickly becomes complicity when there is so much at stake—so many live…
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…hat Jesus decided to submit to the will of God.” McBath, he said, “is in many ways an angel sent from God to communicate that message to me in a way that would bring about God’s will. So this gets terribly religious in the telling, but at its deepest level, that’s what’s occurring here.” For McBath, obeying the will of God on this issue emerged from an eight-week experience between “the heavenly plane and the earthly plane” after Jordan’s death, d…
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…United Nations under the name of ‘Agenda 2030.’” Viganò added: “We know many heads of state have participated in Klaus Schwab’s School for Young Leaders — the so-called Global Leaders for Tomorrow — beginning with Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, Jacinta Ardern and Boris Johnson and, before that, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Tony Blair.” We should worry “The Great Reset” is an explicitly anti-public health conspiracy theory. Viganò has p…
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