Religion Dispatches
…f responsibility shown by “the darks.” As well, there are people who have explicitly chosen not to live in The City. Expats from the city, some wealthy, some less so, settle in the country. Most of these folks carry that “responsibility” frame of reference, which they link to the downsides of living in a city: noise, crime, asshole neighbors. There are also many people who grew up in the country and have decided to remain, or return after a few ye…
Read More…tion is currency and anonymity is easy to come by. A version of this paradox exists in the realm of mass shootings, too. Acts of random violence often seem, in part, to function as dramatic plays for attention or celebrity status. The Orlando nightclub shooter reportedly checked his phone for news about the shooting during the actual event; the man who murdered hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store in Paris last year filmed the attack…
Read More…gh Catholics are hardly a monolith on that front. That leaves for obvious explanations only one, which I’m reluctant to endorse: white Catholics just didn’t like the black guy in the White House. Unfortunately for Trump, even if that’s true, it seems like there’s only one thing they like less: him. You might want to fire up the shock paddles. And if he’s down by double digits among Ma and Pa Kelly at the start of October, get ready to notify the n…
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…e, a useful weapon in any politician’s arsenal, even if it is only an approximation of a more complex reality. In her invocation of Spielberg’s Lincoln, Clinton focused on a more shrewd, less familiar image of Lincoln. The particular episode in Spielberg’s film that caught Clinton’s eye was detailed in David Herbert Donald’s authoritative biography, in which the President denied the existence of peace envoys from the Confederacy in order to win De…
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…are official, though, is the fact that he has defended false equivalencies between pedophilia and homosexuality as nothing more than harmless “Christian beliefs regarding proper sexual ethics.” Crucially, Price also denounced the Obama administration’s landmark support for transgender students as an “absurd” and “clear invasion of privacy.” If Price can’t acknowledge that a transgender girl should be able to use the ladies’ room like all her girlf…
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…to “totally destroy” the so-called Johnson Amendment that currently bars tax-favored congregations (and other non-for-profit 501c3 organizations) from engaging in overt political activity. Trump appeared to be unaware of Mr. Jefferson’s insistence on a “wall of separation” between church and state. One imagines that President Trump might actually have had a go at prayer on the eve of yesterday’s breakfast appearance. What follows is an imaginative…
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…believe in civil rights, individual autonomy, and the equal balance of power in a democratic republic had better get our houses in order and find a better strategy for opposing the next great threat to our way of life….
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…Electronica that almost requires a New Testament professor to provide an exegetical hermeneutic. The mixtape plumbs a depth in which twenty-somethings can feel comfortable; a no-judgement zone where their spirituality is not relegated to a Sunday morning experience, or divorced from the vicissitudes of their daily life. As I’ve written at Religion Dispatches before, there is a commonplace belief that there seems to be a dearth of public theologia…
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…n’t receive the help they need from family. If the civil government uses tax money to help the poor it is understood as tyrannically exceeding its biblical authority and effectively stealing money to do so. (They call such misused taxes legalized theft.) You find this position articulated in rather arcane theological form in the work of R.J. Rushdoony and other Christian Reconstructionists, but you also find it popularized in rather mainstream eva…
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…he political right are not carrying torches or Nazi flags in the streets, though. Most liberals have family and friends who believe falsehoods and aren’t violent, who don’t actively wish harm to their fellow-citizens. Their beliefs and voting patterns are infuriating. People who should have known better put us in this predicament. I want to blame, and mock, and yell at them. But compassion has to be able to coexist with righteous anger at lies and…
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