Religion Dispatches
…study politics or law and also be activists or lawyers, or study music or business and also play music or start businesses. They simply take this for granted. Why, in the case of religion students, is this treated as a problem or trivialized? Will allies of the academic study of religion be pleased if they follow Newsweek’s link, “Related: The 25 Best Schools for Do-Gooders”? Apparently the winners were not measured by actual curricula in social…
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…d not respond to interview requests). Had an Abortion? You’re Not a Second-Class Follower of Jesus I recently met Kent and his wife, Mary Anne, at their church north of downtown, in a corrugated metal warehouse building next door to a Family Dollar store. The Kents’ foray into the anti-abortion wars started three years ago, when he and Mary Anne discovered there was an abortion clinic half a mile from their church. They started praying there, and…
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…ctioned discrimination in places of public accommodation like restaurants, businesses, hotels, etc, forces people out of the public sphere, effectively segregating. While there is still some question as to what level of scrutiny is appropriate when reviewing laws that name sexual orientation and gender identity specifically, courts in the United States recognize the broad importance of protecting people from being turned away from shops in the pub…
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…News’ Huckabee show “doesn’t understand the difference between the state’s business and the church’s business,” because he believes in “welfare taking care of the poor, which is contrary to Jesus’ teaching.” Again, that’s a reflection of the Christian Reconstructionist view of God-granted authority—i.e., it’s not within the government’s “authority” to take care of the poor. I asked Titus whether it would be a big moment for him to see Bachmann, a…
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…this. For as Benjamin Netanyahu is to Israel, so shall this man be to the United States of America!…America will be respected once again as the most powerful and prosperous nation on earth, (other than Israel). The dollar will be the strongest it has ever been in the history of the United States, and will once again be the currency by which all others are judged. In the eyes of many conservative Christian Trump supporters the other Christian Repu…
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…e can’t.” The common denominator is power. The best way to help the middle class, the Fellowship believes, is to help the ruling class. The benefits will trickle down. “They’re so busy loving us,” one Fellowship brother once said of the elites to whom he ministered, “but who’s loving them?” The Fellowship is, and right now they’re loving Sarah Palin, a candidate who has excited the evangelical base like no other since William Jennings Bryan raged…
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…ng Prostitution, Sex-Trafficking, Slavery Annie Lobért grew up in a middle class family on a tree-lined street in Minnesota. Her upbringing was strict, and she hated the rules that her mother and her father and the church imposed on her. “So naturally when I hit the age of a teenager,” she told Joy Behar in a television interview, “I just went wild.” Lobért did drugs and she slept around. She was insecure and felt unloved, so she started stripping…
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…ouraged public displays of beatified passion and, more generally, a middle-class, white (read: toned-down) version of the exuberant call-and-response dynamic that has animated black Pentecostal churches and Southern white revival meetings for generations. On October 25, 1974, as on most Friday nights, Abba’s house band Hebron churned out folk-rock worship music, original tunes that gene-spliced David Crosby and King Crimson—a progressive take on w…
Read More…six figures who now imagine themselves to be part of the struggling middle class. Meanwhile, the people who actually are part of the struggling middle class are being plucked like so many chickens, with their unions under assault, their kids in lousy schools, their shot any kind of retirement security being stripped away with the blessing of the Democrats. As I write this, I am hearing White House factotums and leading Democratic shills talking ab…
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…rsistent critic of teaching evolution in the state’s public school science classes. Despite his belief in Young Earth Creationism, McLeroy, a dentist from College Station told the Dallas Morning News last year, “Creationism and intelligent design don’t belong in our science classes. Anything taught in science has to have consensus in the science community—and intelligent design does not.” But just as Buckingham’s arguments for intelligent design w…
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