Religion Dispatches
…We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping, whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless in…
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…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…
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…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…
Read MoreAt oral argument in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties, Inc. v. Sebelius this morning, the Supreme Court justices spent a great deal of time questioning the lawyers in the case about whether corporations have a religious conscience, and whether Congress intended to protect it when enacting the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). What was most striking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia So…
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…ace. Sure, in the required chapel services at Heritage Christian School in Indianapolis we would occasionally have a speaker who, Campolo-like, would attack the hypocrisy of middle-class and affluent Christians being insufficiently concerned with the human realities of poverty, but this never for a minute threatened our general understanding that when we became old enough to vote we were morally compelled to be “values voters.” And ours was not th…
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…t against SB 101 at both the local and national level. In an op-ed for the Indianapolis Star, the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana’s executive director, Jane Heneger, writes: The ACLU will be the first to defend a church that is threatened or forced by the government to perform a marriage ceremony or any other religious ritual. But such government action hasn’t happened and is unlikely to happen. [SB 101] is a solution in search of a prob…
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…te segregation and economic favoritism. When I spoke with Rothstein on the phone, he underscored the long-term effects of this last policy. During the 1940s and 1950s, suburban subdivisions were built in St. Louis, and throughout the country, using federal loans stipulating that no homes be sold to African Americans. Priced at about $125,000 in today’s dollars, these were affordable—with a mortgage—to working class families, black or white. Yet bl…
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…respond in a biblical way. I resigned from ministry and moved back home to Memphis. I accepted full responsibility for my actions. I was and remain remorseful for the incident, and deeply regret the pain that I caused her and her family, as well as the pain I caused the church and God’s kingdom…this incident was dealt with in Texas twenty years ago, but in the last few days it has been presented to a wider audience. I was wrong and accepted respon…
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…mit African Americans into their congregations. The story here—focusing on Memphis as a case study—is told in gripping detail in Stephen Haynes’s remarkable work The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation. The resolutions just passed originated from the work of the religious history scholar (and PCA minister) Sean Michael Lucas, who literally wrote the book on the denomination’s history, and…
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…ment of 50,000, as if the faithful at church. The devotion was audible, as tickets were distributed to friends of the Cuban government and not through a public sale. Here the religious nature of the Cuban sporting event is acknowledged only to be dismissed as inauthentic. The patriotic, quasi-religious crooning is suspicious because of its apparent production by the Cuban government, which distributed tickets to friends. Morosi recognizes religiou…
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