Religion Dispatches
…passed the “Ryan Budget” I’m thrilled, personally, that it’s Ryan. The GOP ticket is now led by two unbelievably privileged and self-important white guys (are Billionaires for Bush still around to gin up Rapacious for Romney material?), but it’s even better than that. The Ryan Budget is such a gift to the Democrats that one might think the Angel of Moroni had dropped into their laps. Unlike Romney, Ryan is anything but a cipher in respect to concr…
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…’t know what’s changed,’ he said. ‘She’s pro-life, but we already knew the ticket was pro-life. She really doesn’t broaden the agenda.’” AP cites a Pew survey taken last fall which “showed under-30 white evangelicals are increasingly up for grabs politically: 40 percent identified as Republican, down 15 percent from 2005. Most who abandoned the GOP were becoming independents, not Democrats.” ++++++++++ In the land of Regnery Publishing In early Au…
Read More…Party. Of the six recent Congresses essentially controlled by the GOP, from 1995 to 2006, not one ever reduced federal outlays. (The last year in which federal outlays were lower than the year before was 1965, when Democrats ran both the White House and Congress.) As soon as Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House in 2001, spending really took off, with more than $100 billion added to federal outlays every year that Bush sat in th…
Read More…LGBT Advocates Strategize LGBT activists met in the Lori region on October 17 and 18 to develop a strategy for building a movement and fighting homophobia in the country. Pink Armenia reports that after social media coverage of the event, some participants have faced attacks. Hong Kong: Interview with Intersex Activist Activist Small Luk, an intersex activist from Hong Kong, describes the challenges facing her advocacy in Hong Kong and mainland C…
Read More…e of presidential politics, like it or not, perhaps the second slot on the ticket is aiming too low. Why not “Jeremiah Wright for President”? Age is not a problem. He’s six years younger than the oldest candidate, whose age has not stopped him from running neck-and-neck with his Democratic opponents. Racial identity is not a problem. He shares the same African-American identity as a candidate who is running neck-and-neck with his prospective Repub…
Read More…party types who will now turn out enthusiastically. It adds pizzazz to the ticket. An ideological firebrand is the one thing Romney has never been accused of being, and now he can borrow that heat. I believe that Romney or the people close to him pushed Romney for some of these reasons—including getting past the Mormon moment and the focus on Romney’s character. The persistent question about Romney has been: who is this man? What made him who he i…
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…minant political message. Once settled in the far western territories after 1850, the LDS Church chafed under federal control, and when Utah became financially stable in the twentieth century LDS culture embraced mainstream economic beliefs. Joseph Smith’s political protest became a remnant of a foreign past. But the artifacts are there to be discovered, perhaps to be organized into a new political display that has relevancy in the twenty-first ce…
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…battles over religion and science. Fundamentalist Fervor According to Ron Numbers, in his book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America didn’t really start in earnest until the early 1900s. For the most part, Christians were not biblical literalists and accepted science—including the ideas that the earth was very old and that living creatures changed through time. A typic…
Read More…nital area was tucked away at the Met’s Cloisters location, where less than 14% of the 1.6 million visitors went. I agree with Catholic Studies scholar Robert Orsi, who argued that this garment “ought to have been the centerpiece (the centerfold?) of the exhibition.” But rather than give us an exhibit about religious fashion that’s challenging or uncomfortable, the Met delivered glamor and drama, and made sure the gift shop was stocked with nice t…
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…Joe Biden impersonation can’t compensate for this defect at the top of the ticket. No number of morally-impassioned surrogates can compensate. We should not forget that a widely-shared yearning for a moral revolution formed the heart of the Sanders movement. We shouldn’t forget that this surge of moral energy surprised the Vermont senator himself, or that it was really a remarkable thing to behold, especially considering the many liabilities of th…
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