Religion Dispatches
…commissioned by the largest organization fighting for LGBT rights, but the numbers [pdf] show that the sample actually skewed right. Of the 800 registered voters polled 38 percent were strong, weak, or independent-leaning Democrats with 41 percent identifying as strong, weak, or independent leaning Republicans. Conservatives outweighed liberals by 38 to 18 percent, and a full 74 percent of those polled identified as religious. Some 40 percent clai…
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…” language from FRC materials, they neglect to report that FRC president Tony Perkins was on the GOP committee that drafted that platform last year. In addition to several direct quotes from Sprigg that position same-sex attraction as a sinful choice that can be changed, the authors do not directly critique FRC’s framing of the harmful practice as benign-sounding “sexual reorientation therapy.” Although the article does include boilerplate stateme…
Read More…ing little confidence that they know what they are doing or understand where this new tidal wave of cash will actually go. So, flow the money will, anywhere between 600 and 800 billion dollars worth… but where will it go?…
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…re, Louis de Bonald, Juan Donoso Cortés, Julius Evola, and Carl Schmitt, many of whom happen to be influential among the current crop of National Conservatives. What we commonly today refer to as illiberalism, and what we see emerging in predominantly Catholic European nations—most notably in Hungary, but also in Poland, Austria, France, and Italy (and in former Soviet Eastern Orthodox nations to the east)—is a response to many of the same dynamic…
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…ctice, One of my most demanding coaches would say, “It’s time to run.” If anyone dared to ask, “How many laps?” or “How long?” his regular response was, “Until I get tired.” Those practices often meant painfully pushing through a wall of fatigue with no end in sight. My best coaches also relentlessly pointed out my individual shortcomings: tactical mistakes, sloppy play, insufficient leadership, and inadequate strategic compensation for my slight,…
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…are legendary. The former Chief Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of many Middle Eastern Jews, said, among other things, that Palestinians “should perish from the world” and that “it is forbidden to be merciful to them”; of non-Jews in general, he declared that “Goyim were born only to serve us.” Despite comments like these, his funeral last October was the largest in the country’s history, with 800,000 Israelis attending. In the past month, R…
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…credulous “reporting” of the whole affair in the corporate media. Only a tiny number of outlier critics—like Simon Johnson—are given any air time at all. Everybody else, from NPR to Fox News, goes right along with the cute “stress test” metaphor, forgetting that the so-called patient being “tested” is actually an 800-pound gorilla that needs to be put into a cage if not shot dead outright. Johnson pointed out this morning that today’s news non-eve…
Read More…result be a syncretistic blending that pulls the new university away from any clear Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) identity, moving it in the direction of the California Institute for Integral Studies or the Institute of Noetic Sciences? The faculty and administration deny that this will happen. But time will tell. What’s really at stake in the furor of criticism? What trends do they signal? Conservative schools that fight interreligious educatio…
Read More…lthough the times may be changing, a new national survey commissioned by Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council may be the bearer of good news for Wildmon and company. The survey found that anti-same-sex marriage initiatives—on the ballots in three states this fall—may still have pull at the polls. According FRC’s “National Omnibus Study” of 800 likely voters, conducted over June 25, 26 and 29, “marriage protection amendments” on the November ballo…
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…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…
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