Religion Dispatches
A vicious lack of civility is nothing new in American politics. To rely only on recent memory, conservatives have attempted to frame Obama as a foreign-born Manchurian candidate bent on turning the United States into a communist dictatorship built around his own cult of personality. The scale, media coordination and sheer, unsubstantiated nastiness of Right-wing smears is in its own league, but conservatives have pointed out that the Left is not…
Read More…, Japanese, Kekchi, Korean, Kuna, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Quechua (Peru), Quiche, Quichua (Ecuador), Russian, Samoan, Swedish, Tagalog, Tongan, and Ukrainian. Translators will also do their work in real time for local congregations in Albanian, Bislama, Cakchiquel, Estonian, Icelandic, Kiribati, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mam, Nivacle (Chulupi), and Tzutujil. And translators working in Amharic, Efik, Fante, Igbo, Lingala, Twi,…
Read More
…to other places in the world, like the Persian Gulf, Turkey, China, India, Brazil, and so on and so forth, and people are hungry with ambition, eager to embrace the economic opportunities that our country’s desire for globalization enabled and sustained in the first place. Now, we are turning away; we are scared of monsters whose shadows stretch across the planet. But let me end with a note of hope. Consider that, for most Americans, Shari’ah is o…
Read More
…dignity. (At least a Chinese citizen can reconcile an absence of political freedoms with an obvious escape from poverty). Egypt is, in this sense, the most excellent example. Hosni Mubarak has presided over the impoverishment of a country that used to be at the center of Arab culture. Once among the wealthiest provinces of the Ottoman Empire dating all the way back to the Roman Empire (which explains the whole Mark Antony and Cleopatra thing), Egy…
Read More…n easy media catch-all for all “born again” Christians, yet the difference between Franklin Graham’s charity Samaritan’s Purse (evangelical) and the Juba Christian Center, a Pentecostal church also profiled in the piece, is bigger than the broadcast might suggest. Where Samaritan’s Purse is in the business of saving souls, providing sustenance, and engaging in politics on the sly, the Juba Christian Center is going to have a more far-reaching impa…
Read More
…Court ruled unanimously that the city ban violated the church’s religious freedoms. It was the same year that Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prevents laws that place an undue burden on people’s ability to express their religion. The religious methods of slaughter such as the Jewish shechita and the Islamic dhabh remain in most countries, though that is slowly changing. The Dutch parliament recently passed a bill requ…
Read More
…ing the once-a-decade Latin American bishops conference held in Aparecida, Brazil. There, he outlined the contours of the Holy See’s mission of “New Evangelization,” poised to bolster an institution losing its grip on the region’s cultural identity. Thus, the pope arrives in Mexico this week to address the Latin American Church at a crossroads. Inroads made by Protestant, especially Pentecostal, proselytism have eroded the once near religious mono…
Read More…civil and religious marriage. It asked, “Do you support or oppose marriage between two persons of the same sex?” A clear majority of US Catholics said yes (54-40). As a region, Europeans oppose 38-56, but country by country differences are huge: Nearly two-thirds of Spanish Catholics support same-sex marriage (64-27), while almost 8 out of 10 Polish Catholics oppose it (15-78). In Latin America, Catholics in Brazil and Argentina are about evenly s…
Read More
…nvince me otherwise, not in light of the rapid spread of Pentecostalism in Brazil, Prosperity Gospel-styled ministries in Africa, and so on. A word of advice to atheists and humanists: deconstruct theistic models of religions—and expose the illogic and destructive thought and practice by those that have done so much graphic damage to human existence; but don’t be delusional concerning the outcomes of such effort.It might be cathartic for atheist a…
Read More…inues: The young man was learning Portuguese, to do his missionary year in Brazil, for which he left before graduation. When, after a year, he came back to complete his studies, he took more of my classes and we had further discussions. I wondered if amendments to the Constitution were also inspired. He was a little uncertain, but I think he decided they were not. That poses problems I have often thought of since. For instance, the Constitution ra…
Read More