Religion Dispatches
…ey on American Jewish attitudes. His money isn’t about 2016 or even 2020 or 2024, it’s about staving off the shifting views of American Jews about Israel, or at least constraining political dialogue about it. Citizens United enabled Adelson to pour as much of his money as he wants into influencing elections, but that’s really a misnomer. He’s not influencing the outcome of elections, but enforcing how candidates speak. Case in point (a story we kn…
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…s speech—after a long list of far-right celebrity shout outs—by framing the 2024 election as a battle: “the greatest in our history, most important battle in our lives is taking place right now as we speak. For seven years, you and I have been engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it.” The stakes aren’t just political control—though political control is part of it—but existenti…
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…Kremlin must feel giddy knowing that Putin may only need to hold out until 2024—under a GOP president, it appears, Ukraine should not expect aid. The Right’s admiration of Russia hasn’t subsided, even though the images from a besieged Ukraine—the slaughtered civilians, including children—forced them to tone down their accolades for Putin a bit over the last year. Putin’s Russia is their utopia; they imagine it as a White, conservative Christian p…
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…e United States in the event of an authoritarian takeover of the country in 2024. Written by Professor Erica Chenoweth and Dr. Zoe Marks, the Pro-Democracy paper recommends immediate investment into the development of alternative systems and structures in order to render authoritarian-captured structures irrelevant. Chenoweth and Marks point to soviet-Poland’s underground schools created to maintain popular education during the occupation. Transge…
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…would lead to only 70% of white evangelicals to vote for the Republican in 2024 is pure folly. But, why is this the case? Despite the dozens of advocacy groups that have sprung up over the last few years to try and “peel off” white evangelicals, why have they, by and large, failed to move the needle in any significant way away from the GOP? The answer is simply that this group of voters are Republicans first, white people second, and evangelicals…
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…n fact, it might cost him some. It certainly wouldn’t be a get-out-of-jail free card within his own party, as evidenced above. So possible, but not necessarily probable. Another argument is that Romney, like many Mormons, has been turned off by the President’s lack of [ahem] interpersonal moral hygiene. You hear this one a lot when evangelicals are discussed as well. But while it’s true that Utah gave Trump his smallest margin in any state he won,…
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…thanksgiving for the life of Sister Mary Theresa Kane, who died August 22, 2024, in Watchung, New Jersey. A Sister of Mercy for 69 years, she was 87 years old.” Theresa Kane was, in my view, the most consequential, respected, and beloved American Catholic woman of the last half century, without whom enormous changes could not have happened. Theresa was born Margaret Kane in 1936 into a large family with Irish immigrant parents. She entered the Si…
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…non and the Destruction of the American Family Jesselyn Cook Crown July 23, 2024 It’s hard going to read compounding tales of people ruining their marriages and relationships with their children; losing their friends; getting ostracized from their communities; turning family members against each other; traumatizing their young children; making their adult children suicidal; getting sick from taking inappropriate medications or leaving ailments unt…
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…ical thinkers. All of this poses a threat to high-control religion because freedom of thought means a loss of control. We can see this in the recent book bans and libraries closing. Some libraries are becoming “adult only.” It’s a tragedy because kids like me in abusive or restrictive homes won’t be able to access the place where many find freedom: the public library. In the book you use “rift” to refer both to your separation from Christian patri…
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…ad the Gospel to Muslims Adriana Carranca Columbia Global Reports April 30, 2024 In her just-released book Soul By Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread The Gospel to Muslims, journalist Adriana Carranca follows a Brazilian missionary known as Luiz and his wife Gis from their humble origins in Northeastern Brazil through their time as evangelists in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East serving underground communities of Christian conve…
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