Religion Dispatches
…ey on American Jewish attitudes. His money isn’t about 2016 or even 2020 or 2024, it’s about staving off the shifting views of American Jews about Israel, or at least constraining political dialogue about it. Citizens United enabled Adelson to pour as much of his money as he wants into influencing elections, but that’s really a misnomer. He’s not influencing the outcome of elections, but enforcing how candidates speak. Case in point (a story we kn…
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…thanksgiving for the life of Sister Mary Theresa Kane, who died August 22, 2024, in Watchung, New Jersey. A Sister of Mercy for 69 years, she was 87 years old.” Theresa Kane was, in my view, the most consequential, respected, and beloved American Catholic woman of the last half century, without whom enormous changes could not have happened. Theresa was born Margaret Kane in 1936 into a large family with Irish immigrant parents. She entered the Si…
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…non and the Destruction of the American Family Jesselyn Cook Crown July 23, 2024 It’s hard going to read compounding tales of people ruining their marriages and relationships with their children; losing their friends; getting ostracized from their communities; turning family members against each other; traumatizing their young children; making their adult children suicidal; getting sick from taking inappropriate medications or leaving ailments unt…
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…the realization that mixed race people do in fact exist. In any case, it’s 2024 and race science is back in fashion, so let’s grab our calipers and do some skull-measuring! MAGA isn’t just ready to make America great again and again, it’s ready to lend a hand when it comes to the determination of who is or isn’t Black. And I for one am inclined to assume that right-wingers with no understanding of the history of race, racism, race science, or rac…
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…would lead to only 70% of white evangelicals to vote for the Republican in 2024 is pure folly. But, why is this the case? Despite the dozens of advocacy groups that have sprung up over the last few years to try and “peel off” white evangelicals, why have they, by and large, failed to move the needle in any significant way away from the GOP? The answer is simply that this group of voters are Republicans first, white people second, and evangelicals…
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…ery, and the Refounding of America Matthew Stewart W.W. Norton & Co. March, 2024 The prideful bit comes naturally to me as someone who was ordained by the Congregationalists and who currently rolls with the Unitarians. Because of course the Yankee Congregationalists and their Unitarian offspring went all in for abolition, not to mention labor rights, women’s suffrage, and so on down the line, right? For years I’ve taken comforting reinforcement fo…
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…e paragraph Rep. Raskin quoted at the Summit for Religious Freedom in April 2024—think of what it must have been like to read or hear those words in the bleak winter of December 1776. The American people needed a victory on which to pin the last shreds of their hope. They needed a win. General Washington had Paine’s words read aloud to his soldiers on Christmas night before they crossed the Delaware River and routed the British and Hessians at Tre…
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…bills, which rolled out starting in 2023 and became a defining part of the 2024 legislative cycle as well. Those aren’t trying to police speech in the classroom per se, because that [tactic] was running into legal issues on First Amendment grounds. Instead, they try to reshape what services schools provide to their students. These bills aim to create the language that talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion and talking about how to create…
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…ad the Gospel to Muslims Adriana Carranca Columbia Global Reports April 30, 2024 In her just-released book Soul By Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread The Gospel to Muslims, journalist Adriana Carranca follows a Brazilian missionary known as Luiz and his wife Gis from their humble origins in Northeastern Brazil through their time as evangelists in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East serving underground communities of Christian conve…
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…rotestant Women and the Consecration of Empire Gale L. Kenny NYU Press Feb, 2024 Indeed, racism and imperialism are such endemic features of conservative Protestantism that, all too often, historians and political analysts alike mistakenly position them in opposition to typically left-leaning ideals like secularism, feminism, and political and social liberalism more broadly. But to do so is to ignore how racism and imperialism actually influenced…
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