Religion Dispatches
…e United States is in fact deep, thick, and complex. But this interest, at times referred to as “New Age,” has not necessarily translated well to the television screen. The short-lived television series Kung Fu left a lot to be desired, no? (Although, if one works hard enough, there may be something intriguing in the show related to the implied transcultural geography of inner struggle and “harmony” that brings together the Shaolin Monastery and t…
Read More
…siness “from the bottom up,” surpassing “his father’s accomplishments many times over.” Trump, in other words, earned his own way to the golden toilets of Mar-A-Lago, never mind the $1 million loan, the connections, or the $40 million inheritance that all came from his father. God and Trump is a terrible book, but it is an important book, in its way, for those of us struggling to understand how Christians can support a moral cretin like President…
Read More
…sm as they did for the Glatzels. The cultural impact of The Exorcist was renewed on February 12, 1980, when it premiered on network television. In fact, the entire Glatzel family had watched the film together before David’s troubles began. Whatever actually happened to David, the family was primed to interpret the situation—and to respond to it—in terms of the film. In 1981, Russell Chandler of the Los Angeles Times noted that the entire affair “s…
Read More
…the big screen in a packed theater (one of 550 nationwide) presenting the Rushdoony worldview to unsuspecting evangelicals, homeschoolers, and tea partiers. What was not evident from pre-release promotional material was the central influence of co-producer Marshall Foster, a “guest” through much of the film. As president of the Mayflower Institute (now the “World History Institute”), Foster was the “David Barton” of Christian Schooling and homesc…
Read More
…conspiracy theories is the conflation of disparate vocabularies. Occult (a word which simply means secret, or hidden) is not a term necessarily linked to evil. The negative connotation has been added over time. The claimants also conflate masonry, Egyptian mythology, Satanism, and the Illuminati, as if they were all the same. Accusations linking popular culture artists with the occult were raised during the social upheaval of the ’60s and the ’80s…
Read More…renced the disappearance of Christian children. Nope: According to today’s New York Times, at the Democratic Senate retreat yesterday President Obama urged Democratic lawmakers to resist sanctions against Iran and said that “he understood the pressures that senators face from donors and others.” It was reported that one Senator in particular, Robert Menendez (NJ), stood up and took “personal offense” to the President’s assertion. RJC Executive Dir…
Read More
…hardly think that condemning violence is inciting violence,” she told the New York Times when asked to comment on the video. “I think the ad is very clear — there are excerpts from actual riots that are included in the ad, and that’s exactly what I’m addressing.” https://twitter.com/martynlenoble/status/880285143105118208 https://twitter.com/DLoesch/status/880287503265280000 Most Americans root their moral precepts in faith, or at least they sa…
Read More
…ith its 10,000 panes of glass, seating for more than 2,700, and one of the world’s largest instruments — the Hazel Wright organ —was completed at a cost of $18 million and dedicated in 1980. In 2011, after mounting financial problems and infighting among church staff — including a rift between Schuller and his son (and heir apparent) the Rev. Robert Schuller, Jr., over the direction of church ministry — the Crystal Cathedral filed for bankruptcy,…
Read More
…st the antiChrist?” Now, Rick Wiles is a known entity—he’s the founder of Tru*]}*News, a pastor of a Florida church whose fundamentalist Christian platform has a long history of antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQIA+ messaging, and which rambles on in ever more hysterical apocalyptic tirades while begging for money and preaching extreme conspiracy theories. And while this kind of language is militant and weird, it’s not (yet?) a normative part of f…
Read More
…over the causes of the shooting rampage. Some, such as Ruth Graham of the New York Times, have pointed to the gunman’s exposure to the toxic sexual purity culture common to the evangelical world, and how it breeds self-loathing and misogyny. But members of the AAPI community (as well as RD senior correspondent Chrissy Stroop) have pushed back on this explanation, not without good reason. They point to “sex addiction” being used by law enforcement…
Read More