Religion Dispatches
…nn Beck for his “caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left,” charging that he “brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.” Kristol is this close to Roger Ailes and the heart of Fox News, so if Kristol is criticizing Beck, then that means that the sharks, instead of being jumped over by Beck, are in the…
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…rong-men—and they are almost entirely men. Think of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. No surprise that one of the first responses around the world to Trump’s victory were scenes of cheering right-wing Hindus in India and admiring Russians in Moscow. One of the first notes congratulating Trump came from an enthusiastic Duterte in Manila w…
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…d soon “be everybody.” As it stands the National Abortion Fund receives thousands of calls monthly from women desperate to fund their abortions, Saporta says, and while there are important distinctions between the military abortion ban and the implications of the Stupak amendment, she considers the results more or less the same. “Women in rural areas may have to travel over 50 miles to obtain care, but they don’t have to travel thousands of miles….
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…orts,” is indeed “long-discredited.” But then they offer what amounts to an 800-word platform to the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg. The short piece serves as a teaser for Friday’s episode of 20/20, the result of a year-long investigation into several ex-gay “camps” located in the American South. The 20/20 segment features interviews with at least two young people sent to the camps—as well as self-described pastors and administrators of th…
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…that legalized abortion.” He “voted for federal funding of abortions on a number of occasions,” including 2003, when “he voted for an amendment that would repeal President Reagan’s ‘Mexico City Policy’ and allow funding for abortions—and abortion counseling—abroad.” In 1999, “he voted to kill an amendment that would prohibit taxpayer dollars to fund abortions covered by federal health insurance plans… [and] in 1997, [he] voted for an amendment th…
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…of one generation being visited down three or four generations (Exodus 20; Numbers 14; Deuteronomy 5; Jeremiah 32). This transmission isn’t mystical but is both genetic and cultural. Just as abuse begets abuse and addiction begets addiction, prejudice begets prejudice. In the Christian Scripture, Paul talks about the need to reckon not just with sinful individual nature but with “principalities and powers,” a theological way of describing the impe…
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…oused in a former basketball arena, looked to be dry and quiet, even as thousands of Houstonians were seeking shelter from Hurricane Harvey. “Joel Osteen” started to trend on Twitter with comments about the hypocrisy of the prominent Prosperity Gospel preacher, who tweeted out that he and his wife were praying for Houston, while appearing not to do anything to address the great needs of his neighbors. Houston’s Joel Osteen has a net worth over $…
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…the atheist bus adverts, said: ‘You wait for ages for an atheist bus, then 800 come along at once. I hope they will brighten people’s days and make them smile on their way to work.’” So will it be a year of smiles for the faithless—or, perhaps, the faithful? A lot depends on the economy. Religion didn’t fare particularly well during the Great Depression. Despite the seeming need for alternative realities, church attendance didn’t swell in the 193…
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…t is almost invisible outside the academic world because the text is nearly 800 pages of dense, jargon-filled prose.” Rest assured, we do not need to read Taylor for ourselves because David Brooks can be trusted. His ongoing effort to distill for us the density of jargon is a choice well-honed. The result: a column that we have chosen to read (again, wisely) and, moreover, a readerly choice that becomes a sign to others and ourselves that we are a…
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…e, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most important debates and produced some of the most fruitful arguments in support of National Conservatism, the in…
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