Religion Dispatches
…Politifact. Of course, the questions Huffington and the DNC raise are not new. In 2007, Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi scrutinized “Romney’s Honesty Problem” on abortion, and John McCain’s presidential campaign developed an anti-Romney ad strikingly similar to the DNC’s. But this time around, as attention continues to consolidate on Romney as once-and-future frontrunner, it seems clear that the honesty meme is going to stick. It may in fact…
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…g. I think he, like many American activists, is invested in a sort of self-promoting iconoclasm in order to bring about greater equality. Like many American preachers, he invents a new consensus in his speech in order to develop the broadest base. And, like many in the avant-garde, he suggests his personal preferences are specific indictments of presumptive American norms. However, I think (like many love-children) he doesn’t and won’t equal the a…
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…d. At the very time the pandemic was escalating outside the United States, new anti-retroviral medicines had become available in our country that helped to mitigate the alarming rate of death. This good news was offset by immense apathy that swept this country, along with a mindset that it was impossible to share this medicine with the impoverished of the world in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. My book was an attempt to express what I heard as G…
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…0s, they are simply living life as they think it should be lived. Take the New Fire network as an example. This consortium of groups of young adult ecumenists energetically rejects the liberal/conservative war even as they commit their lives to fostering peace with justice. As one New Fire participant and member of the Church of the Brethren states, We live in a world that is broken, hurting, and calling out for the children of God to be revealed….
Read More…Romney’s 1967 statement that he had been “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam War, a statement that all but destroyed his campaign for the Republican 1968 nomination. What the younger Romney learned from his father’s mistakes, according to Swidey, was a profound sense of caution. During the 2008 campaign, Peggy Fletcher Stack, an award-winning religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, interviewed members of the Mormon congregations (or “…
Read More…es that also put him at odds with Democrats, notably his opposition to the Vietnam war. At the end of the piece, citing an interview Hatfield did with Sojourners magazine in 1996, the piece notes he found the religious right an “embarrassment” to his party, as well as his concern about its influence on Christianity, rather than politics. In fact, Hatfield was prescient several decades earlier about the impact of the religious right. In the forewar…
Read More…hurchgoing nation.) The 2006 midterm Elections featured several successful new Democratic candidates, including Ted Strickland (who won the Ohio gubernatorial race) and Sherrod Brown (who won a US Senate seat from Ohio) who made no bones about their personal religiosity. Both candidates retained the services of a new political consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, which was founded in 2005 with the express aim of “helping Democrats reclaim the…
Read More…ny are on the job. In a recent post at Talk2Action, Wilson writes that the new 10-minute video “features never-before publicly heard audio from Sarah Palin’s key church, the Wasilla Assembly of God and never-before publicly seen footage from Pastor John Hagee’s now-infamous ‘God Sent Hitler’ 2005 sermon, in which Hagee pantomimes a Nazi holding a rifle pointed at Jews. ++++++++++ Hagee Hears a Who-madgeddon For the few gifted enough to retain info…
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…lloween grew from an amalgamation of these traditions, carried over to the New World by Irish and English immigrants, and tied to autumnal celebrations and activities that would include ghost stories, harvesting rituals, and dressing up in costumes. By the early decades of the twentieth century, so these accounts claim, the holiday became primarily child’s play, and a secular, fun-filled, consumer-oriented, neighborly celebration where the dead we…
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…ow have the men fared in the two decades since they moved to Arkansas from New York? “We haven’t been shot at in two, maybe three years,” says Schenck, who was working as a bar-back in the Stonewall Inn on the day of the riots in 1969. “For our first pride parade, we had over 1,800 protesters and over 3,000 people holding a prayer vigil. This past year we had just one rabid protester. We’ve come a long way.” Loyd, a soft-spoken Vietnam vet who gre…
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