Religion Dispatches
…s, 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 claimed the moniker of “born again,” and 33 percent said they attend…
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…orts,” is indeed “long-discredited.” But then they offer what amounts to an 800-word platform to the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg. The short piece serves as a teaser for Friday’s episode of 20/20, the result of a year-long investigation into several ex-gay “camps” located in the American South. The 20/20 segment features interviews with at least two young people sent to the camps—as well as self-described pastors and administrators of th…
Read More…e, have a number of relatively small field stations, research facilities coordinating work on malaria and other blood-borne diseases. In the absence of a coherent alternative, they were ordered to become AIDS research labs as well. A great deal of the initial outlays went into converting relatively small field stations into much larger research laboratories called upon to expand their mission well beyond their current scope. The results thus far h…
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…s because it obviates the commitment to first principles and to a divinely ordained order on which a theology and philosophy of morality and virtue depends. But the Catholic Church also has built into its DNA an all-consuming survival instinct, an awareness that evolution and entropy also are its enemies as an institution. From this fear, certainly for conservative Catholics, flows a consistently urgent desire to control this flux that is absent f…
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…introduced the white “discomfort” criteria. Biden repealed this executive order on his first day in office. The Florida bill, like the other bills, is part of a coordinated Frankenstein-style strategy for exhuming and resurrecting Trump’s defunct executive order. However absurd the premise, the language merits further interrogation. What does it mean to say that the avoidance of discomfort, particularly by those who represent the country’s histor…
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…s week the Times of Israel published a post, written by American Yochanan Gordon, titled “When Genocide is Permissible,” which concludes with the following question: If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals? Last week, the man gunning for the top spot at the Anti-Defamation League, New York University s…
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…dulous “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-event…
Read More…multi-religious graduate school.” Of course, Claremont is not alone. Hartford Seminary boasts the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, the country’s oldest center of its kind. A second imam training program is being launched by the once all-Christian Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; its website calls it “the largest and most diverse partnership of seminaries and graduate schools in the United States, purs…
Read More…oncern over the Iraq War, a crumbling economy, rising gas prices, and a record number of housing foreclosures, are making a comeback. In 2004 Team Bush, in concert with a host of conservative Christian evangelical leaders, made anti-gay marriage initiatives the centerpiece of their campaign to drive evangelical voters to the polls to vote for Bush and fellow Republicans candidates. This time around many political observers have posited that the cl…
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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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