Religion Dispatches
…Republican Party as the “anti-slavery party” and the “election of Abraham Lincoln as the first Republican President,” to the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the passage of civil rights laws during Reconstruction, and the election of blacks to office. Barton writes that while the Democratic Party platform was defending slavery, “the original Republican platform in 1856 had only nine planks—six of which were ded…
Read More…lenn Beck, David Barton and Sarah Palin will be on a stage in front of the Lincoln Memorial for a rally dedicated to “restoring honor” in America. If the posts on the Facebook discussion board are any indication, there will be busses there from all over the country when Beck announces “the Plan.” While he’s said very little about the Plan, or who the other speakers will be, Beck has “discovered” a medal of merit George Washington awarded and, char…
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…pon President Truman to set aside a day of prayer—as did President Abraham Lincoln on April 13, 1863—as a “day of confession of sin, humiliation, repentence, and turning to God at this hour.” Graham spoke from the place where the stand is erected for the inauguration of presidents. Mr. Truman, specially invited, did not attend. The crowd filled about half of the paved parking space facing the center steps of the Capitol. The staircases leading up…
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…e Common Good, favors making abortion illegal, and only views reducing the number of abortions as an interim step toward that goal. It is hard to take seriously a movement that thinks they can dramatically reduce the number of abortions while largely ignoring or denying the issue of access to contraception—including emergency contraception. One understands that they feel their hands are tied by the official position of the Catholic church against…
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…se people were just holdouts, who would soon give up or die off. The large number of young families I saw at St. Joan of Arc—around a third of the parish—suggest to me what others must have by now have realized: that this constituency is not going anywhere soon.” Lefebvre’s views wove together theological, ecclesiastical and political conservatism. Though, like all traditionalist groups, the SSPX claims to be preserving the Church’s immemorial tra…
Read More…s shift in thinking are myriad and have only intensified since 2008 when a number of studies indicated that for the first time in US history, less than 50 percent of Americans classified themselves as “Christian.” Such shifts in church decline have been documented in the Church of England (UK) for decades. As reported by the Rev. Steve Hollinghurst, Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture, the Sheffield Centre, Children’s Sunday school…
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…the dominant brand of today’s Republican Party. For good reason, a growing number of expert observers have begun sounding the alarm. I suggest it’s time we hit the panic button. The rally featured plenty of repugnant elements—from the relentless attacks on transgender youth consistent with fascist scapegoating, to the steady drumbeat of election fraud claims, to accusations that Dr. Fauci engineered Covid-19 in a Chinese lab to help a demonic caba…
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…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…
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…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…
Read More…bravery. The law that passed in June—which is, I think, best explained as cheap populist scapegoating—has served to activate and embolden widespread homophobia, which seems to me to have been previously often latent (the homophobia I encountered in Vladimir 10 years ago was none too aggressive). Phenomena like “Occupy Pedophilia” have appeared on the scene. Although it’s hard to say exactly how common anti-LGBT violence is in Russia, it should be…
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