Religion Dispatches
…of end-times theology, a black president who almost half the country seems to believe is not a Christian and a black robed army of preachers ready to fight for America. All of this churning religious melee can’t end well. Beck has just started another Web site “The Blaze,” where you can get news that Beck says “will pursue truth.” Beck would probably just accuse me of being a communist, but about what he is selling on Fox and at “The Blaze,” Vlad…
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…It’s the consequence of allowing the Second Klan to fizzle out instead of crushing them, and pretending that it was simply a Southern phenomenon, a rural phenomenon, a poor and ignorant phenomenon, rather than one that existed in every state and was made up primarily of the White middle class professionals who mixed money, power, social hours, and bigotry up with their violent pageants. It’s the consequence of failing to deal with the far-right mi…
Read More…by moving birth control to the center of the national conversation, Obama succeeds in turning the presidential election into a battle over social conservative “values,” that’s bad news for Mitt Romney, good news for Rick Santorum and—in country where vast majorities (including Catholics and Mormons) still take contraception for granted as a human right—for Obama’s re-election campaign as well….
Read More…to be fair to Leonhardt and even to the Google people who popped out the “news” about the religious searches. They aren’t intending to make value judgments; they are merely offering data-related observations, and they also clearly deplore the widening inequality that increasingly makes for two Americas. But can we allow here that mere raw data aren’t enough? Some context on the real lives of the 21st-century Joads would be a lot more illuminating…
Read More…ments against marriage equality have lost their impact in key parts of the world. “We’re losing the marriage battles — that’s the truth, especially in Western Europe,” said Ignacio Arsuaga, a Spanish activist who founded a global online campaign platform called CitizenGo. (Its board includes Brian Brown of the United States’s National Organization for Marriage.) “Our arguments are not reaching the majority of society. The majority of society just…
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…ers and exterminated for “humane” reasons, Dayan suggests that the “worst cruelties” often belong “to a politer world.” The abstract concern with “humane treatment and aversion to cruelty empowers those who sacrifice dogs and their owners to a judgment about what kind of human—and what kind of dog—is acceptable.” In other words, the fighting dogs of fighting men, she argues, “become the medium for, and ultimately suffer from, the intimidation, con…
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…of the Saints’ responsibility to preach the gospel in the last days. When news that Moroni’s trumpet had been dashed from his hand, there was a predictably varied response among Latter-day Saints and others who looked for significance in the moment. Some religious critics of the Church of Jesus Christ suggested that Latter-day Saints should consider themselves divinely rebuked. Others drew on an obscure item of folklore (as much about what Latter…
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…on health. Conservative Protestant beliefs in “the basic sinfulness of the world,” for instance, have been tied to lower levels of well-being. So, too, religious constructions of gender that map to issues of reproductive health, educational equality, body image, domestic violence, poverty, and so on clearly undermine multiple dimensions of wellness in ways that are masked by studies that overgeneralize diverse, often contradictory notions and prac…
Read More…fessed something regarding her sexual history, and you’re surprised by the news, search your vocabulary and choose your words carefully so as to avoid unfortunate double entendre. I’m looking at you, Victoria Koloff. 4. “I’m not upset with you. I want to know how you’re feeling” is a really standup thing to say when someone tells you difficult news. Olivia Perry, a single teen mom of a baby daughter named Eden, isn’t happy with the results of Eden…
Read More…ake him the poster child for promoting unnatural sexual expression is a form of child abuse.” The group claims over 12,000 members responded to an “action alert” to contact Fayetteville officials demanding an end to the parade. Of course, the good news in this is that poll data indicates that the Will Phillips of the world are going to win this battle. And the petty bigots for whom the phrase “liberty and justice for all” are just words to be parr…
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