Religion Dispatches
…an in-laws gave her a car, which had to be cleared at customs before local registration. Then we went to the farmers’ market, the flea markets, and the swap meet. She insists on using a baby carrier instead of a stroller. So I held her six-month-old while she pillaged through a sea of clothing. That’s a lot of holding, trust me. When we finally returned to her place, I was hungry, but I just could not take another moment of being so family-oriente…
Read More…s the religious minority is allowed to wear in public, like in France, and registration of worship spaces. Several commentators note that many of the Muslims in Switzerland are European, from Eastern Europe or Turkey, and therefore are phenotypically white, reducing the racial component in all of these debates. I am uncomfortable with this reasoning as it ignores the experience of racial categories of whiteness that we saw in the US, and which wer…
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…d secularism can coexist in the Democratic big tent, with neither being relegated to second-class status. It would certainly be a better strategy than constantly trying to prove that Democrats are as religious as Republicans. All the Democratic leadership needs to do to pursue it is to find the imagination to think beyond Republican framing, and the courage to tell a new kind of story about American pluralism….
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…thanksgiving for the life of Sister Mary Theresa Kane, who died August 22, 2024, in Watchung, New Jersey. A Sister of Mercy for 69 years, she was 87 years old.” Theresa Kane was, in my view, the most consequential, respected, and beloved American Catholic woman of the last half century, without whom enormous changes could not have happened. Theresa was born Margaret Kane in 1936 into a large family with Irish immigrant parents. She entered the Si…
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…gs, once prohibited the advertising and mailing of abortifacients. In March 2024, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over abortion medication, these two septuagenarian justices signaled their wish to resurrect Comstock laws. A casual observer might come to a myopic conclusion: these anti-abortion justices are invoking Comstock provisions in an effort to once again outlaw abortifacients. But that conclusion misses the bigger picture. By ta…
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…help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5th, 2024. It’s a great revival. “Upon taking office…” Trump makes several concrete policy promises that flow from this White Christian nationalist vision. It’s not worth quoting Trump’s rambling justifications for the policy proposals he connects to this worldview. Lest anyone think Trump’s White Christian nationalism is empty rhetoric, however, this speech also included promi…
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…a blessed day”? Perhaps this question wasn’t on your American controversies 2024 bingo card; it certainly wasn’t on mine. But when Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery described this situation as “creeping Christian nationalism” in a now-deleted tweet this past weekend she got pummeled, with responses ranging from mildly critical to disturbingly trollish. Some saw in her tweet, with some justification, the kind of smug progressivism that man…
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…lot of the media reports of CPAC have claimed that there is a rift in the Republican Party, that the party is being torn in two. Some mention the “Principles First” summit as a competing event, which took place during the same time as CPAC. However, if you take a closer look at the roster of speakers, you won’t find a single Republican with influence in the current GOP. Conservatives like Adam Kinzinger and Bill Kristol, whose Bulwark was one of…
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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…ey on American Jewish attitudes. His money isn’t about 2016 or even 2020 or 2024, it’s about staving off the shifting views of American Jews about Israel, or at least constraining political dialogue about it. Citizens United enabled Adelson to pour as much of his money as he wants into influencing elections, but that’s really a misnomer. He’s not influencing the outcome of elections, but enforcing how candidates speak. Case in point (a story we kn…
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