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…res like roads and bridges and airports and ports all badly in need of high-tech repair. The buzzwords of the day speak of “shovel-ready” projects. It is less and less clear what that means. Are there really shovels, with men and women at the handles, eagerly waiting to be put to such work? Perhaps. There certainly are in New Orleans and its environs. But enough to absorb these staggering sums? That seems doubtful. And I begin to worry that this p…
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…s it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most important debates and produced some of the most fruitful arguments in support of National Conservatism, the insurg…
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…cently as 2008, white Christians comprised 54% of the population, but that number is 44% today. More immediately, this legislation lifts language directly from former President Trump’s executive order targeting CRT, which banned the use of so-called “divisive concepts” and 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 Biden repealed this executive order on his first day in office.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 Fran…
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…lling of defenseless Palestinians without shame. Describing this week’s pro-Israel rally at which Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner declared open season on Gazans for voting for Hamas, the Forward’s Hody Nemes wrote: The pro-Israel rally was organized by UJA-Federation of New York, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and other groups, and had the backing of nearly the entire organized Jewish community, including the Reform, Conservative and…
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…taphor, 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 even has a kind of Goldilocks character that the big media are bound to lap right up. It will turn out that the $1 trillion in TARP is an amount “just right” to cover the self-declared capital needs of the big banks. Bernanke said this…
Read More…d 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, pursuing interreligious collaboration in teaching, research, ministry, and servic…
Read More…gape Press), and a legislative action arm, AFA Action. The re-birth of anti-same-sex marriage initiatives Anti-same-sex marriage initiatives thought to be buried in the wake of voters concern 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 cent…
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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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