Offers 1 800-299-7264 Cheap Flights to Key West – American Airlines | Search Results | Religion Dispatches

American Civil Religion is Dead, Long Live American Civil Religion

By Peter Laarman

…cultures while they are also expected to understand and respect the common American culture; 4. We acknowledge the nobility of the American experiment even as we acknowledge certain “flaws” that God needs to “mend” (in the prayer-hymn wording of Katherine Lee Bates). Now suppose we update this problematic creed for the sake of telling the truth, junking the impossible notion that God has somehow chosen the United States for a special destiny or is…

Will the Religious Side with Workers?

By Peter Laarman

…vances at the workplace is an entirely different matter. It smacks of an un-American and vaguely socialist mindset. See below. A still-active “Protestant Ethic”: There’s a reason why Max Weber didn’t call his big book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism. Weber believed that Calvinists have a particular anxiety about making it on their own, but the historic reality is that most Protestants share this anxiety and share an apprehension a…

American Indians Irate over Bin Laden Code Name “Geronimo”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…eing hunted during the last of the Indian wars in Arizona and Mexico in the 1880s it was said to cost the American military over one million dollars to kill each Apache. Compare that cost to the nearly one and a half trillion dollars the United States has spent since 2002 tracking down Osama bin Laden and the two or three hundred members of al Qaeda said to be fighting from the mountains of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It’s safe to say the United…

In Speech to Religious Broadcasters William Barr Warns of Secular Tyranny, Promotes Christian Tyranny

By Chrissy Stroop

…Andrew Seidel, author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, maintained, “Barr is misreading Adams.” To substantiate the point, he observed, “Adams, like the other founders, thought religion and morality were two separate entities; Barr thinks they are one and the same. The founders thought religion could be a substitute for morality. We now know that they were wrong on this point.” What Seidel means here, as he details in…

What Passover Taught Me About Being Black

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…re the true chosen people.” It’s become a regular occurrence for an African-American celebrity, entertainer, or athlete to post to their social media account that they’ve uncovered the “hidden truth” that Black people are “real Jews” to the chagrin of the mainstream media which, in a predictable knee jerk reaction, label them anti-Semites and hatemongers. Simply put, Hebrew Israelites are in style. Within rabbinic Judaism, the High Holy Days (Rosh…

Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…t the ruler of Sharjah is that he is a very conservative person. He’s very Western-educated, and yet he doesn’t want his country to go the way of Dubai. And because he’s a conservative person, that gives the green light to others who might be worried that this Charter isn’t kosher. And my friends in Pakistan are also doing interesting things. They’re having to proceed very slowly because things are so terrible in Pakistan. People are getting blown…

Right Makes Might: The President as Political Realist

By John D. Carlson

…l valence of war, the pursuit of peace through force, and the noble causes American wars have defended. He forcefully affirmed that some evils—Nazism, al-Qaeda—require coercive force to confront. Speaking especially to Europeans, Obama left no room for presidential pacifism. (The German Marshall Fund reported that over 70% of Europeans disagree—about 50% strongly—that war sometimes is necessary to achieve justice.) He lamented that “in many countr…

How to Meet Muslims: A (Cinematic) Primer

By Haroon Moghul

…film, it is the suggestion that such extremism can be blamed solely on the 1980s dictatorship of Gen. Zia ul-Haq, who presided over Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In fact, the country’s leaders long played with and manipulated religious rhetoric to achieve secular objectives. One example of this is the 1971 War, a consequence of which was the independence of Bangladesh, previously East Pakistan. It all started when, after n…

LGBT Editor In Bangladesh Murdered by Islamists—and More, In this Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…t not be forced upon us and certainly must not be sneaked upon us …,” said West. West is a representative of the Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society, a group that has worked with American evangelicals to resist moves toward decriminalization of homosexuality. Caribbean: Report examines support for anti-gay laws in Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago Mahalia Jackman at the University of Manchester has published “They Called it the ‘Abominable…

‘America First’ and the Origin of the Modern Jewish Conspiracy

By Eric C. Miller

…destroy Europe—the sort of belief that continues to underwrite much present-day anti-Semitism. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Hanebrink about the project. Much of your work traces the history of anti-Semitism, and you’re doing that work at a time when anti-Semitism seems to be resurgent once again. How do you situate this political moment within that larger history? That’s an interesting question. Conspiracy theories flourish in times of political…