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Even After an Obama Victory Reports of the Death of the Religious Right are Greatly Exaggerated

By Bill Berkowitz

…ble with, Obama. Expect these newer folk to meet with Obama administration officials and to work together on a number of policy issues including Obama’s plan for revitalized faith-based initiatives, global warming, combatting AIDS in Africa and poverty at home and abroad. “Look for the stock of religious conservative leaders such as Rick Warren, Stephen Mansfield, author of The Faith of Obama, and Cameron Strang, publisher of Relevant, a hipster C…

RD News Round-Up—Nov. 4, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…n had $1,690,914 in revenue in 2007. Americans United points out on its website that there are a number of other important religious right organizations to be aware of, including Gary Bauer’s American Values, Rick Scarborough’s Vision America, and Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition. An expanded version of the Church & State story is available here. ++++++++++ New Coalition takes on Christian Zionism Before the end of the year, the Los Ange…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…vement. I also think there are common misconceptions about both health and spirituality that prevent us from seeing the relationship between the two. In the U.S. today, religion and medicine are often seen as separate spheres—mirroring Descartes’ erroneous understanding of the “mind” as independent from the “body.” I like to point out that the etymology of the term “salvation”—which comes from the Latin, salve, which means “good health” and is som…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…ogy of Benedict, many Catholics are already being encouraged to take their spiritual business elsewhere. We have seen an increase in the number of American politicians who are asked to remove themselves from communion lines and, recently, priests have even denied parishioners communion if they vote for a political candidate who favors abortion rights. This exclusion from the sacrament is essentially a form of excommunication. Dogma Over Diplomacy…

Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle

By Michael Schulson

…ath a great metal bible. Across the street is the main temple, built in the 1980s and early 1990s, much of it with volunteer labor. The building is white, and its sloping surface, like a 26 story-tall circus tent, is paneled. The effect, whether intended or not, is of stairs marching up to heaven. Alternately, the building resembles the arched back of some great albino reptile, or a pangolin on its hind legs trying to lick the sky. Inside, it’s a…

A Jewish Perspective on Reparations

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

…he rate of poverty among black vs. white Americans hasn’t changed since the 1960s). In The Fire Next Time, whose essays were first published in 1962 but damningly relevant 52 years later, James Baldwin writes that for blacks, “[American society] is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down …[as it] has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day…The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this coun…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roo…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…e past quarter century has been its laser-like focus on a relatively small number of interrelated issues. The religious left would need to define its agenda priorities clearly and precisely in order to earn concrete policy victories. Nor am I convinced that we should write an obituary for the religious right. As Dionne notes in Souled Out, “The end of the religious right does not signal a decline in evangelical Christianity” (p. 4). Far from it: e…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…f having long hair. One month later, two allegedly gay youths, aged between 15 and 17, were attacked and beheaded with their heads thrown in a rubbish bin, said a witness to the attack. A subsequent attack on a Baghdad brothel, thought to have been carried out by the same militia, killed about 34 people, most of them women. Turkey: A Country Divided on LGBT Issues Rev. Irene Monroe writes this week about Turkey being a conflicted country, both a s…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…ized by upward mobility but by severe poverty and social isolation. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of persons living in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 40 percent or higher grew from 7.8 to 15.8 percent for blacks and from 7.0 to 9.5 percent for Hispanics, and by 2010 the proportion of Americans (irrespective of race) living in high-poverty neighborhoods was 15 percent. Further evidence of the growing social isolation of urban poor pop…