Religion Dispatches
…the mainstream. This year, Donald Trump made it the venue for his apocalyptic bid—not for the New Heaven, but for the New Earth, christened by the blood of his enemies. Less a New Jerusalem than a New Elohim City. His speech was more than just factually inaccurate, it was quite literally apocalyptic….
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…Kremlin must feel giddy knowing that Putin may only need to hold out until 2024—under a GOP president, it appears, Ukraine should not expect aid. The Right’s admiration of Russia hasn’t subsided, even though the images from a besieged Ukraine—the slaughtered civilians, including children—forced them to tone down their accolades for Putin a bit over the last year. Putin’s Russia is their utopia; they imagine it as a White, conservative Christian p…
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…g congregations are increasingly normative in Catholic churches. No wonder new, community-based models of church and new job descriptions for ministers are replacing the old. In Mercy circles, “integrity of word and deed” is a high value. Think of that in light of the double crossing by Pio Laghi and the insulting request by the Vatican that Theresa “clarify” (i.e., walk back) her statement on ordination. Not likely, gentlemen, and not done. There…
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…from public view. We therefore have to read between the lines of the many newspaper articles about injuries caused by Lysol and similar products. In 1934, for example, a short news item in the Hammond Indiana Times reported how two unmarried eighteen-year-old “Chicago girls are in St. Margaret’s hospital today, severely burned about their legs from lysol disinfectant.” The two women “received their burns in a washroom in Johnny Nichols’ beer tave…
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…Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy Cait West Eerdmans April, 2024 Cait West’s insights could not be more urgent. At a time when conservative lawmakers and influencers idealize “tradwives” and vilify “childless cat ladies,” West draws from her experience as a survivor of the Christian patriarchy movement to expose the mythologies that sustain and reinforce it. In her work as an editorial board member for Tears of Eden (a nonprofit su…
Read More…ters? With regard to Adelson, the editorial contends, his early support of Newt Gingrich “didn’t really work. Gingrich lost the primary, and the protracted, intra-party fight weakened Mitt Romney in the general election.” Every election cycle, we talk about the “Jewish vote” whatever that is. If it can be broadly characterized, it’s largely Democratic. Vogel told the Forward, “Very little of the money given by Jewish donors is actually spent on in…
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…states like Pennsylvania and Michigan that really doomed Clinton. But the new analysis suggests that it would be foolish for the Democratic Party to restructure its platform around attempting to court the white Catholic voters who went for Trump because they’re a dying breed…literally. The only age group that overwhelmingly voted for Trump were Catholics age 75 and older, who went for Trump 57% to 44%. The age groups roughly corresponding to Baby…
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…in a Synod of Bishops in October of 2023 and another session in October of 2024. Several hundred bishops and a few lay people will develop suggestions to “submit to the Holy Father,” (IL par.10) who, unsurprisingly, has the final say on what comes next. In plain English, what’s called the Synod on Synodality, an infelicitous phrase if ever one were hatched, is an ecclesial effort that retrains sights on Rome as the locus of decision-making, albei…
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…Carvalho, who died earlier this year—even more so than Bannon, de Carvalho promoted an explicit form of Christian nationalism that advocated against LGBTQ rights and other liberal democratic norms on the basis that society was experiencing a period of “decay or “decadence,” common dog whistles among Christian nationalists meant to convey that undesired groups like people of color, immigrants, and of course LGBTQ people present a threat to the nati…
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…country would be immune from the threat of civil war, wouldn’t it? Yet, a new American civil war is no longer unthinkable. Political scientist Barbara Walter has identified two specific factors that predict the likelihood of civil war occurrence. Alarmingly, both variables are present in the United States today and are quickly pushing the country to the brink. The first is “anocracy,” a political science term for countries that mix democratic and…
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