Search for "reconstruction"

History in the Making: Religion, Race and Gender in the Presidential Election

By Peter J. Paris

…ara Jordan from Texas became the first blacks elected from the South since Reconstruction—96 years after the fall of Reconstruction and less than a decade after President Lyndon Johnson called a press conference in the middle of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech before the Credentials Committee of the Democratic Party over the issue of all-white primaries in Mississippi. Thus, it is an understatement to say that race has always been a factor in presidenti…

Kirk Cameron’s Monumental Reveals Subtle Influence of Christian Reconstructionism

By Julie Ingersoll

…s that philosophy of history that Foster brought to Cameron’s project. The Reconstructionist Theological “Trinity” Christian Reconstruction promotes a “biblical worldview” with three interlocking theological notions that, while framed in technical language, have been popularized for over half a century in simple terms and slogans that are now familiar to watchers of the religious right. Presuppositionalism stipulates that all knowledge is underst…

Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?

By Gary Dorrien

…asive, direct, and unrelenting, which helps to explain why $200 billion of reconstruction aid has produced almost no reconstruction. Iraq could explode again at any time, because Sunni leaders are demanding real power, the Shiite parties are determined not to yield it, and intra-sectarian resentments are boiling. Shiite and Kurdish leaders are stonewalling against integrating Sunnis into the army, and they are gathering the fingerprints, retinal s…

Great White Men, Again?: On Lincoln and Our Civil Religion

By Paul Harvey

…ony Kushner, has recently re-articulated some long-discredited myths about Reconstruction. The inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way, without any question, was one of the causes of the kind of resentment and perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote-unquote ‘noble cause,’ and the rise of the Klan and Southern self-protection societies. The abuse of the South after they were def…

W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet

By Edward J. Blum

…stice ran throughout the book, and Du Bois concluded his magisterial Black Reconstruction with the vision of God weeping over the end of Reconstruction. Perhaps in a second edition I’ll have the opportunity to change the title and explain why in a new prologue. How do you feel about the cover? I love the cover. It is Du Bois at a young age, in his thirties, ready to take on the world. Too often we display images of activists or reformers from thei…

Could a Real Life Jurassic Park Help with Climate Change?

By Michael Schulson

…e PCRs and CRISPRs, as well as hyper-specialized techniques like epigenome reconstruction via the analysis of deaminated cytosine bases (how quaint!). In short, de-extinction, like extinction, would be a display of human power—an expression of our control over nature. Other potential problems are just as knotty. Shapiro chronicles them with evenhanded precision. Would bringing back extinct animals revive dangerous pathogens? (Probably not). Would…

When Fundamentalism Follows You Out the Door: Transphobic Statement Exposes Exvangelical Trauma

By Chrissy Stroop

…ing this up is to note that there are multiple paths of deconstruction and reconstruction, and multiple endpoints, and that to build exvangelical community, we need to hold space for different people’s paths and paces of deconstruction and reconstruction. In their weaponized use of social justice rhetoric, like many fundamentalists before them, those behind the MC appear to have latched on to what they take to be a shortcut to virtue. Of course, t…

A Monumentally Different Kirk Cameron

By Julie Ingersoll

…the Christian pop-culture embodiment of premillennialism, joined Christian Reconstructionist homeschool leader Doug Philips in laying the blame for the decline in America at the feet of premillennialists waiting for the rapture. Warren Throckmorton notes Cameron’s reliance on Reconstructionists David Barton and Herb Titus as “experts” in Monumental, presented as though they’re neutral scholars, though RD has shown repeatedly that they are anything…

Public Shrines to Treason: Charlottesville and the Cult of Confederate Memorialization

By Spencer Dew

…a state of ongoing truce. This Confederate civil religion, crafted during Reconstruction and continuing to the present day, has served to keep the country tenuously united. But as this Confederate civil religion has allowed the Civil War to continue in a state of détente, this détente allowed for Confederate desires and fantasies to exist coincident with dreams of and affiliation with America. Devotees of the Lost Cause venerated the Founders as…

Kentucky Court Clerk, A “Professing Apostolic Christian,” Questions Legal Authority

By Sarah Posner

…ent, each with its own authority and sphere of legitimate influence. . . . Reconstructionists do not seek to unite church and state but they do seek to bring the civil government under biblical authority. In fact, they seek the complete transformation of every aspect of culture to bring it into alignment with what they believe the Bible teaches. Kim Davis very well may have never read a word of Christian Reconstruction in her life; she may very we…