Religion Dispatches
…of ex-Christians because in his estimation, “We do not have commandments that leave anyone out, and we do not judge, we do provoke questions, mock ourselves and our strange belief and others. But we leave judgement to the courts. We may not agree with every court decision, but we are always looking for proof.” He adds that the reaction he gets from Christians about the UCB depends on the Christian. “There are good Christians and bad Christians, a…
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…f purely individual achievement. This is the dream of a just commonwealth that animated what historians call the “long 19th century,” a time when the prerogatives and pretensions of the wealthy were aggressively and repeatedly challenged by self-respecting farmers, by small business owners threatened by the monopolists, and by the savagely exploited people who toiled for endless hours in mines and mills and railways. It is a millenarian dream whos…
Read More…rn Orthodox Christianity. According to court documents, Mr. Glenn alleges that the defendants have violated his First Amendment and (Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act) rights by failing to have his Eastern Orthodox religion placed in the IDOC Handbook of Religious Belief and Practices (the ‘Handbook’). He also alleges that he has been denied access to Eastern Orthodox services, communion, and confession, and to other religious i…
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…e off this huge but hidden domination system? On the issue of capitalism, that was beyond what I felt could be productively handled without making the book too long for anyone to read. I’m reminded of something that a friend who consults with the government of China was told by a Communist official: “We know that our current economic system isn’t working. We know we need a new one. Whatever it is, it will still be called communism because our cons…
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…their own research, to discover the truth for themselves, while insisting that much of what we think we know, and most of what we’re told by the mainstream media, is a sham. Jones—as persona or person, as character-actor or journalist, as you like—speaks from a location of sincerity. His exaggerated emotionality loses no force if it’s seen as a theatrical device. His claims—to challenge normative narratives of news, to expose conspiratorial plots,…
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…it wither on the vine will create a bigger bloodbath for the GOP in 2018. That is, what’s to their partisan advantage? Not to put too fine a point on it, Paul Ryan does not give a shit if he doesn’t get a single Democratic vote for this monstrosity. Ryan is driven by an ideological obsession with cutting taxes and the social welfare programs they support. He can pursue that vision because he has solid backing from the Republican party. (He has had…
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…F follows the reliably profitable cosmology-meets-Revelation-meets-tinfoil-hat message that most recently blipped the secular radar screen in the form of John Hagee’s 2013 bestselling book, Four Blood Moons. Clarke’s distribution isn’t huge—around 10,000 on Facebook and 60,000 on YouTube—but he’s on his way. His posts get shares and the comment sections are hopping. To peruse his universe—and against my own better judgment, I did—is to fall down a…
Read More…) Evil incarnate, she is nevertheless weak, and as such the source of all that is wrong with this country, now cast as a dystopia. Ben Carson has even gone so far as to cast her as Lucifer. Keep in mind that Trump has claimed to be the most Christian of all contenders, indeed the most Christian of Christians, during the primaries, while now tipping his hat to the evangelicals who supported him during his acceptance speech at the RNC. And many of h…
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…e parishes, then appeared to flatline. Dreher says the risk is similar to that of American Orthodox churches, and that Latin Mass has become a “boutique niche.” For right now, however, Latin Mass has become one more chess piece in the war for Catholic cultural identity in America. On the one side, Pope Francis is making his moves, elevating bishops like Cupich and Tobin, keeping an eye on the “rigid” and “defensive” Catholics calling for a return…
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…SB 8 since Governor Greg Abbot first signed the bill in May of 2021. But what I was not prepared for was the torrent of social media posts that inundated my Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feeds after the law went into effect that drew explicit connections between the anti-abortion restrictions and Islam. Hashtags like #ShariaLawInTexas and #TexasTaliban, as well as political cartoons featuring burqa-clad women in black “pray[ing] for Texas wome…
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