Religion Dispatches
…section on the Fed, amid a jumble of claims that veer from World War II to Vietnam to the Patriot Act to an indictment of Fox News, including superimposing Howard Beale’s rant from Network over an image of Rupert Murdoch, the film also links the Bush family to support of Hitler — a claim also made and documented by non-rightwingers. Fixated on “one world” conspiracy theories, the film glorifies Lou Dobbs for reporting on the North American Union…
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…wanted to go. There’s only one column, labeled “Destination.” It includes Vietnam, Peru, Jordan, Sri Lanka, Cuba, and Ireland. My life doesn’t feel long enough to possibly go to all the places I want to go. My body doesn’t even feel big enough to hold all of the longings I feel. I’m confused when people ask me whether I’m lonely. I already feel like a small country. I do admit—especially as I turn 40 this summer—sometimes I still feel haunted by…
Read More…nd the U.S. Military, 1942-1993, dates the trend back to the Vietnam War.) New York Times, 2005: There are also growing numbers of enlistees from evangelical churches. In 2005, there were 1,794 members of the Assemblies of God in the Air Force, 597 from the Church of the Nazarene and 108 from the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Because so many churches cannot be comfortably categorized as evangelical or nonevangelical, and because so many enlis…
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…am and fulfilling it.” A message conveniently timed for the opening of the new season of American Idol. But if the local libertarian right threw up its hands this year, the anti-abortion right continues to draft King into their cause. The Rocky Mountains March 4 Life celebrated King Day by marching to the former home of Planned Parenthood on the west side of Colorado Springs (the facility has since moved, but both the old and new locations are in…
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…cy looks like on the ground. The most important stops on that trip were in New Orleans, 16 months after Katrina, and in the Rio Grande Valley, where I accompanied a team of experienced organizers on a tour of the region where the shantytowns along the Mexican border had been organized more than a decade earlier. I don’t pretend to have done a full-scale ethnography of the Southwest IAF network. How could one do that in a summer and a winter? Rathe…
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…ymakers, and non-Jewish Americans the confidence that American Jews expect new approaches to the Arab-Israeli conflict and new ways of talking about it. Ending the Silence about Israel and Human Rights “It blows my mind that my Jewish brothers and sisters, who are with me on Darfur, who were with me on South Africa, can’t bend themselves to deal with injustice to the Palestinians,” said Reverend Dr. Susan Andrews, a former moderator of Presbyteria…
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…a 1977 scandal involving North Carolina beauty queen Joyce McKinney in his new documentary Tabloid—an episode deeply intertwined with, among other things, Mormonism and cult deprogramming. Morris’ corpus has consistently focused on self-deception and the difficulties in reconstructing past events, and Tabloid is no exception. The McKinney scandal is simple: in love with a young Mormon named Kirk Anderson, the beauty queen flies to his mission site…
Read More…tical usage, the myth expanded as America spread its reach to the moon, to Vietnam, and to the Middle East. If we are exceptional and if we work the hardest, than surely we deserve to grow. It’s not imperialism, it’s a blessing for our hard work. This is the myth Pawlenty draws on when he brings up the examples of Valley Forge, the moon landing, and the settlement of the west. These myths are more than just ways of giving America meaning, and sell…
Read More…ve long been critical of the Air Force Academy’s tolerance for, and indeed promotion of proselytizing and coercive evangelizing of cadets. MMRF’s objection to McClary is only the latest in a ongoing battle between MMRF and the Air Force Academy. MMRF became involved after one of its members who attends the academy complained about McClary, saying that attendance at the luncheon is technically optional, but “strongly encouraged.” According to MMRF…
Read More…Protestant churches through the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s, anti-Vietnam War movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and the battles for women’s rights and gay rights in the ‘70s and ‘80s. However, they lost many of their foot soldiers during the Clinton era, when they went into hibernation inside a non-descript office building titled “the God Box” (because of all the religious organizations housed therein). While hunkered down in this…
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