Religion Dispatches
…er have and they never will. The coming four years will see a widening gap between the people and their President on this fundamental issue. As Americans come to know how extreme his position is, the intensity of the struggle to protect these children will only increase…” – A Grave Mistake and an Abiding Hope, Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life “The election results and the scandal of the Catholic vote only confirm that we are still suffering fr…
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…up; or in her case, not. I suspect that Judge Noonan was considered a safe bet to balance the pro-choice president: an eminence gris whose conservative Catholic bona fides are polished by his claim that a fetus is essentially a person from the time of conception. Regardless of his intentions, anti-choice people must have been deeply disappointed that he did not take one for the team. Despite his valiant if ineffective effort to link anti-abortion…
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…s likely to say the quiet part out loud, Hyde-Smith would have been a good bet. She joked about sitting in the front row at a public hanging during her campaign to win a senate seat in the state which had the highest number of recorded lynchings. The Christian Nationalist identity draws legitimacy from the motto foisted upon this country during the Civil War and the Red scare. Our government is legitimizing Christian Nationalism. It’s time we get…
Read More…Nevada, Ken Buck of Colorado, Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Joe Miller of Alaska, and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware. You can bet that no matter how the numbers finally shake out in next month’s election, Barton and DeMint, and their views on “Judeo-Christian heritage” and “biblical law,” will continue to have allies in high places….
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…rth and welcomed same-sex couples to their churches, offering blessings. I bet many would offer legal marriage as well, hardly poaching adherents from a tradition that seems happy to see us go. One million German-speaking Catholic women from five organizations signaled their view that same-sex couples be eligible for church blessings. New Ways Ministry reports almost every day on a new group stepping forward, most recently the Association of Catho…
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…r what grounds them biologically. Being “created in the image of God” is a better bet. We are all learning together about this, some of us more willing to admit what we do not know than others. But we can certainly agree in the meantime that persons trump genitals, that competence and willingness to serve are far more relevant than gender identity when it comes to Christian life. This means ordination and decision making for women on a par with me…
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…ez to pass immigration reform. As I said, were he alive today, it’s a safe bet that Chavez would be an opponent of any legislation that gave illegal immigrants even a chance at legal status.” The extent of this misrepresentation is stunning. Chavez opposed undocumented labor inasmuch as workers were exploited, used to depress wages, and undercut unionization efforts. While he did oppose Mexican guest worker programs he simultaneously campaigned fo…
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…n these pages that paranoia about the president being the Antichrist stood between Obama and winning over evangelicals, advances this argument again in the Times, noting that these apocalyptic views “could help define the 2012 presidential campaign.” Sutton provides a brief history of the apocalyptic fervor of American evangelicals, and its impact on our politics. But for Democrats pondering over how Obama can win reelection, I found this to be th…
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…f? I think this book can go a long way to inform people about the tensions between democracy and social control in American history. And it can teach people a lot about how evangelical Protestant traditions have changed over time, including the ways they have reshaped strategies to engage the political realm. I’m afraid there are no pleasurable parts of this book. In fact, it’s really grim. People with relatively good intentions did bad things. Bu…
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…rged. The origin of this project, we’re told, was with a 2007 episode of BET’s American Gangster devoted to the infamous career of Jeff Fort. Natalie Moore, a journalist and author of a book about masculinity in hip-hop, watched the show, saw professor and youth activist Lance Williams interviewed in it, and the next day she emailed him, asking for a list of books about contemporary black street gangs in Chicago. “There are none,” he replied. An…
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