Religion Dispatches
…he occasion that I would be unlikely to forget. But this is only for those round numbers. There’s nothing that rings out of 58. I’ve got two more years, if I live, before I need to find the next big celebration. I’ve got time to plan still. But, why 5-year increments? Seems a bit arbitrary. Because I accepted Islam in one of those round figures, and spent the first ten years in such constant transition: first the religion itself and learning new t…
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…nts higher than among all registered voters.” Indeed Tea Partiers are even more conservative, and more wedded to a religious argument against abortion than Republicans as a whole, with 46% of Tea Party adherents citing religion as the prime influence on their abortion views, compared to 40% of Republicans. 3. Republicans and anti-choice activists are unabashed about lying about Planned Parenthood. While defunding Planned Parenthood isn’t about abo…
Read More…say they don’t really expect him to. The opioid-abuse epidemic that kills more locals every year is “not going to improve for a long time,” 76-year-old Maggie Frear said. We’re all mortal. If you don’t care what happens to the world after you leave it, or to people alive now whom you never see—if all you care about is having your resentments symbolically gratified—then Trump 2016, Trump 2020, Trump for the Great Tribulation and Thousand-Year Reig…
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…rticular: that Jesus Christ is his “Lord and Savior.” Evangelicals like my mother don’t need that text anymore to perceive something divine in his continuingly improbable story. Like evangelicals around the globe, she has an abundant archive of internet footage to download at her convenience as a visual reminder that her personal stories of comeback and belief are part of a broader narrative in which God helps the underdog in this life. Find a Cat…
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…as it does a rousing rendition of the Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger ditty “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave.” Yet “On a Note of Triumph” was also, in its own idiosyncratic way, deeply religious, making use of the rhythms of liturgy and a self-consciously biblical tone, which was made all the more surprising by the fact that Corwin was hardly a religious man. A Boston-born Jew of Hungarian and Russian descent, he had spent Friday evenings in his yout…
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…the law would: “declare an AR-15 style rifle chambered in a .223 Remington round or a 5.56x45mm NATO round to be the National Gun of the United States.” The bill was introduced by Moore, and has the support of Santos and Lauren Boebert (who famously owned “Shooters,” a restaurant where servers openly carried guns). Santos, who’s been exposed as a fraud and a con-man, recently proclaimed his love of the AR-15: “This is a gun manufactured in the Uni…
Read More…le to conclude that the obligation is satisfied once there has been a full round of litigation, with the arguments in support of the statute presented to a court. A constitutional duty to defend need not mean continuing to litigate once a court has then ruled. The President didn’t have to defend DADT in court in the first place. He doesn’t have to keep on defending it now that a judge has struck the law down. It would be perfectly legal for the Pr…
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…overnment action. We can combine the two. We already have good examples of modern movements that have used this dual approach: the campaigns to reduce drunk driving and second-hand smoke inhalation. In both cases, while laws were enacted, there were also rather successful crusades (probably not too strong a word) to stigmatize individual violators as… well, we don’t exactly have a word for it, but in the 19th century they would have called the vio…
Read More…umber of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind movies) was…
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…nority opposed to what Spectrum stands for on WT’s campus, “there is a lot more support on campus than Wendler would like you to believe.” In an act of what some might call Texan defiance, Spectrum is planning to move ahead, not just with its legal appeal, but also with a drag show on campus this coming spring. In a time when the Right is relentlessly attacking LGBTQ people and families, drag performances, and transgender rights, young people like…
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