Religion Dispatches
…’t know what’s changed,’ he said. ‘She’s pro-life, but we already knew the ticket was pro-life. She really doesn’t broaden the agenda.’” AP cites a Pew survey taken last fall which “showed under-30 white evangelicals are increasingly up for grabs politically: 40 percent identified as Republican, down 15 percent from 2005. Most who abandoned the GOP were becoming independents, not Democrats.” ++++++++++ In the land of Regnery Publishing In early Au…
Read More
Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
Read More…much of the conservative infrastructure. Even if Palin is not viewing her trip through an electoral lens, she is, I suspect, far more comfortable with an evangelical approach to her trip. She’s a Christian Zionist, to be sure, and like many of her co-religionists, the Jews are adorable pawns in God’s plan. Spiritually speaking, she’d be far more at home with a Christian tour. And if she is trying to appeal to Jewish Republicans, I’m guessing she…
Read More
…senior citizen and take his middle. I have watched passengers with first class seats hand their tickets to uniformed veterans and sit in economy. Several times I have witnessed people move further back to allow a mother to sit next to her children. All of these required not only the hassle of moving, but also the discomfort of a worse seat. Sometimes the person with the better seat was asked, sometimes s/he offered. In most situations, the person…
Read More
…e success either. The opening weekend saw sales of more than $6 million in tickets. That’s the kind of number that will inspire others to try and figure out the formula for the faith-and-family blockbuster. Yet, with the cost of the film reportedly exceeding $30 million, it’s an open question whether or not the Left Behind reboot will get a second installment. The marketing problem of evangelical movies is still, stubbornly, a problem. The general…
Read More
…g that the giant elephant in the room had escaped from some circus on the Strip. But you’d be wrong. That elephant in the room with us was our own. There’s no pachyderm in Vegas—or on Earth—that big, or that ugly. This elephant was born in July, when a well-known skeptic blogger named Rebecca Watson, who maintains the “Skepchick” website, complained in a video about something that had happened to her at an atheist conference in Dublin. She had bee…
Read More…mmitted to use my little bit of savings to pay for this once in a lifetime trip and then my sister dies suddenly leaving me the beneficiary of her life insurance policies. The cost for the trip was secured and as the year wore on I simply waited for my return to the US to begin my hunt for a travel agency to handle the details. My first question was about the visa. Having been stalled at the embassy when I tried to make hajj almost three decades a…
Read More
…d and called n*gger, not just during the Civil Rights Movement, but in the last two years by Tea Partiers. I doubt many if any of the Occupy Atlanta protesters have experienced anything like that. By becoming slaves to the “process” rather than accepting inspiration, the majority behaved like the corporate scions they hope to overthrow. Not much inspiration happening when the process mimics a board meeting. What my Fred Shuttlesworth piece showed…
Read More…t lane. [ZOA president Mort] Klein gave Adelson a gift mezuzah for his new Las Vegas home (in which “God himself would be happy to live if he could afford it”] then Miriam Adelson told the audience “how I fell in love” with Hagee “the most effective Christian Zionist in the world” and then Hagee described the Adelsons as “the greatest citizens of America.” And the crowd kvelled. The extravagant accolades did not end there. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), wh…
Read More…m his home in East Helena, Montana, to a predominantly Mormon community in Las Vegas, Nevada, so that he could be surrounded by LDS people. He served in the Church, attended LDS temple services, worked for a Church-owned bookstore, got engaged to a woman, and prayed earnestly that he’d feel the same kind of attraction to her as he did to men. “But one day in the temple,” Cox says, “I got the impression I was asking for the wrong thing: that I shou…
Read More