Religion Dispatches
…ame duck session and the “fiscal cliff” and the prospect of a not-so-grand bargain in which Democrats will yield yet more ground to Pete Peterson’s baleful “austerity for you but not for me” proposals. The immensely powerful Peterson machine pushes a dishonest, cunning narrative that has entranced far too many Democrats and that wages vicious war on workers by other means—by paring away all forms of social insurance and by punishing older workers…
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…e from seeming to hawk a Bible in Lafayette Square to actually hawking one on his social media platform. We know exactly how much Christianity and the Bible is worth to him—and it’s a bargain! Happy Holy Week! Correction: An earlier version of this article remarked that Trump held the Bible upside down. RD regrets the error….
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…estroy your very existence, simply because they are trying to drive a hard bargain; You cannot assume that all the fault and blame for the problem lies with your opponents; You cannot let your self-esteem rest on showing your strength by being intransigent, prejudging outcomes, and inflicting defeats on your opponent. Breaking any of these rules, and certainly all three of them, dooms the negotiation to be fruitless from the outset. Thus, the call…
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…the role of the Daughters of the Confederacy in promulgating it in monuments and textbooks. Moreover, there were always strands of evangelicalism that resisted this view and continue to do so. But these days, evangelicalism is silencing criticism within its own ranks as part of its Faustian bargain with Donald Trump, as some 80% of them voted for him. And over the last fifty years obscure factions within the evangelical tradition laid the groundw…
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…d now the Christian Right has made clear what it gave away in this devil’s bargain—any last shred of a legitimate claim to moral leadership with, as Michael Gerson wrote in the Post, its embrace of “angry ethnonationalism and racial demagoguery”: At the Family Research Council’s recent Values Voter Summit, the religious right effectively declared its conversion to Trumpism. … There is no group in the United States less attached to its own ideals o…
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…cism is suspect, although according to Joshua Green, the author of Devil’s Bargain, the new book about Bannon and Trump, Bannon grew up in an observant Catholic family and, despite some dalliances with world religions like Buddhism, considers himself a practicing Catholic. As America magazine’s Michael O’Loughlin notes in a Washington Post profile of Bannon’s somewhat opaque relationship with Catholicism, while Bannon proclaims that both the Catho…
Read More…ting in God. Thus the Lord sends Samuel, who doesn’t turn out to be such a bargain. The passage is really about Israel’s recurring faithlessness; and yes, there is arguably a lesson about the dangers of temporal authority. But Hovind sees this passage as a quite literal message about low taxes and small government. You won’t find any mention of camels and needles in Godonomics, nor any substantive reference to Jesus’s love for the despised and the…
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…vers who’s obsessed with religion, so moving to America from England was a bargain. The Bush presidency was underway, the Christian right were on the march, and the country was going down the tubes so fast you could hear a sucking sound. Secrets & Wives: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy Sanjiv Bhattacharya Soft Skull, 2011 But I was only peripherally aware of Mormons. I remember the polygamist Tom Green appearing on Jerry Springer once…
Read More…should force the GOP to do some serious soul searching about their devil’s bargain to hand the soul of the party to Tea Party hotheads, the nakedly anti-Mormon evangelical right, and the Fox News celebrities who cultivate them. Meanwhile, Romney’s surrogates have been trying to paint him as the safe candidate. Said the host of today’s cookout, Doug Scammam, “When I wake up in the middle of the night I’ll feel safer knowing he is in the White House…
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…n, the close link between America and freedom—not to mention America’s capacity to strive and fight for “everyone”—is left unchallenged. The problem, Kaepernick suggests, is that the country is not “holding its end of the bargain,” not living up to its professed ideals—especially when it comes to black people and military veterans. One can imagine another kind of interpretation that would question the intrinsic purity of these ideals, that would s…
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