Religion Dispatches
There’s a big Christian Book Expo being held in Dallas, Texas next week. Oddly, as a Christian author, I have not been invited. As we have pointed out on this site before, the word “Christian” has apparently come to mean a very narrow definition of Christian – mainly religious right Christians (who by the way, no longer wish to be known as “the religious right” because, well, that’s just makes them seem mean and narrow). This narrow usage of the…
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…tion? To understand these issues better, I called up a historian of lying. Dallas Denery II is the author of The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment, a study of how premodern theologians, courtiers, and philosophers grappled with the question of when, if ever, it was acceptable to lie. We had an honest conversation about God, Donald Trump, fact-checkers, and whether dishonesty is essential to civilization. _…
Read More…t year, Weinstein sued Klingenschmitt and Jim Ammerman, the founder of the Dallas-based Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, seeking to end their imprecatory prayers against him and his family. Klingenschmitt and Ammerman insisted Weinstein’s claims were unfounded, with Klingenschmitt telling the Dallas Morning News, “I never prayed for anyone’s death . . . I never prayed for anyone’s violence. All I did was quote the Scriptures.” In April 2009, Kl…
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…obal strategic services for FotF and co-author of “Marriage on Trial”; Joe Dallas of the Dallas-based Genesis Counseling, and author of “The Gay Gospel? How Pro-Gay Advocates Misread the Bible”; and, Jim Tonkowich, of the Washington DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy, and can be found here. ++++++++++ RD Tidbits: CPAC Rides Again: As the calendar whisks its way toward Super Bowl Sunday and the annual Oscar fest, another less celebrated b…
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…or sell for under two dollars). And unlike the internet, the space of the iPhone feels not just private, but personal. Yes, the iPhone might be my means of connection with the world—it is, after all, a phone—but it is also my own little password-locked garden that I carry with me wherever I go. Moreover, I can remake the landscape with a few flicks of my fingers whenever I choose. As a result, the territory necessarily mixes the sacred and the pro…
Read More…Obama’s National Catholic Outreach Coordinator] informing him of the three phone calls, requesting that he respond to my question: ‘I would like to know whether the Catholic National Advisory Council for Sen. Obama is still operative.’ He has not replied. Donohue’s statement continued: It would appear, then, that the group no longer exists. It is not hard to understand why. After being criticized by the Catholic League, Archbishop Joseph Naumann…
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…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…
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…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…
Read More…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…
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…serious danger to women and trans men, were introduced by Herndon. In her phone interview with RD, Abbott brought up the December 22 service as an example of likely illegal political organizing by a tax-exempt church, which she says is one of her biggest concerns. A self-described “fourth-generation Bonner County girl” who forthrightly states, “I deeply care about consensus issues; I hate political parties,” Abbot referred to the year of Trump’s…
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