Religion Dispatches
…s in Serbia, and US bombers tried to obliterate Baghdad—and therefore armchair American moralists are in no position to criticize Israel from the comfort of their suburban homes—it is hard to come up with a persuasive response. If pro-Israel doves object to almost anything Al Jazeera decides to transform into yet another symbol of Zionist bestiality, eventually we will hear evidence that Palestinian propagandists and their media allies have distor…
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…common sense to choose the best leaders.” It’s important to emphasize that best doesn’t mean perfect, as Abraham, Moses, and David would remind us. The assumption of God’s providence, however, doesn’t work both ways—that is, it can’t be positively applied to Trump’s presumed opponent, Hillary Clinton. That may seem inconsistent, at least on the surface: if God chooses imperfect people, then can’t God choose Clinton as well, or even instead? It wou…
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…be a strong nation, it needs to have a moral core. And that moral core is best defined by evangelical Christian teachings. So, there you have this formula that allows White evangelicals to demonstrate their right to political power: If we don’t have political power, everything’s in trouble. So again, this is the White Christian nationalism that works, not just on the popular level, but also on the political level—and this has been so firmly ingra…
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…r Pérez, the division between different stages of pregnancy is illusory at best. “Doing this work makes me realize it’s not black and white,” Pérez says. “A lot of people at abortion clinics are actually having miscarriages… so trying to draw that distinction just doesn’t work for the way people lead their lives, and the way that abortion works. Midwifery care was always tied to abortion care. This connection is not a new thing. The current politi…
Read More…his is very much a primetime soap opera. The show’s Wikipedia page puts it best: “romantic entanglement will occur.” Come for the spacefaring science, stay for the melodrama. (Or is it the other way around?) But Defying Gravity isn’t just concerned with the characters’ “entaglements.” As in the work of Philip K. Dick, our earthborn religion is a concern as well, particularly in the pilot episode (available on Hulu through September 7th). As the sh…
Read More…n of their faith than they are now?” Mr. Harris is an apologist—one of the best—for the worldview that modern liberals have appropriated from Perle, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Fukuyama in which American military dominance, paired with Silicon Valley solutionism (brilliantly deconstructed as a corporatist regressive farce by Morozov and others) combines with Randian objectivism to usher in a new era of Pax Americana—with the silicon chip as the golden c…
Read More…long as those needs get the response they deserve. As it happens, even the best of leaders blow it once in a while. The trick is to recover as best you can, while maintaining the human connection. Politicians don’t have to be Jesus, but if you can’t occasionally set the prepared speech aside and invite people to share their suffering, then as a candidate you’re not worth a bucket of warm piss, to use John Nance Garner’s colorful expression. In tha…
Read More…model, is severely restrained in its authority over economic activity. The best check on the depravity of individuals who make up the civil government is the decentralization of authority into the distinct spheres; the best check on the depravity of human beings in the economy is the decentralization of the market created by competition. Historian Michael McVicar has this called this “theocratic libertarianism”: it creates an economic zone free of…
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…with their inability for critical self-reflection and critique are not the best champions of healthy life orientations. I remain hopeful that collaboration and partnership will be difficult to achieve but not impossible. I am not calling for a naïve stance marked by blindness—either to the deep dimensions of our differences, or to the great harm that theistic (and atheistic) perspectives can produce when they nurture bad ethics. I left Burbank thi…
Read More…Mars Hill megachurch Mark Driscoll, whom Sandler wrote about in a previous book, said, “We are in a city with less children per capita than any city but San Francisco….and we consider it our personal mission to turn that around.” What that means for the women in his church, who are instructed to assume a “submissive” role within marriage, is predictable. “My life is much harder, not easier,” says a woman named Judy. “We had originally planned not…
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