Religion Dispatches
…ptist Covenant.” This covenant encourages Baptists to unite in efforts to “Promote peace and justice, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick and marginalized, welcome the strangers among us, and promote religious liberty and respect for religious diversity.” They also determined to plan a meeting that would bring all Baptists in North America together; 16 million Southern Baptists were invited, but their leaders…
Read More…rected recently toward Change.org, which provides a platform activists can use to create and manage petitions. On Monday, Change.org deleted a wildly inflammatory petition supporting the sodomy ban because it violated Change.org’s guidelines on hate speech. The petition included links to anti-gay materials from American religious right groups and leaders including Paul Cameron, the Traditional Values Coalition and MassResistance. Other anti-gay p…
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…these values, without advocating a radical alternative, such as socialism. Promotion of labor unions, laws guaranteeing a “just wage,” pensions and social security would have been the sort of policies promoted. This seems to be Moore’s perspective also, who speaks broadly of creating an economically and socially just democracy. While it is unlikely that Moore has spent much time poring over papal social encyclicals (which are not easy to read), h…
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…d very few conversations with the people around me. Which was a shame, because that’s what I went desiring. Didn’t feel like people wanted that, or that it was the atmosphere that fostered dialogue. Was it difficult to keep a vision of the Trump folks’ humanity in the face of their pretty obvious provocation? It was. It was hard because a lot of the chants weren’t directed towards [Trump] supporters, but Trump himself. A lot of the yelling or push…
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…their own company-wide time systems. At one point, American rail companies used around 75 different standards by which to pace their hours. Within a single city, a train leaving on one line at 3:45 could leave before a train leaving at 3:30 on a different line, because the two companies counted the minutes differently. Not surprisingly, railroad owners wanted a common currency of time, or at least a reliable way of making conversions. They got it….
Read More…nd something legal in this country. In a morning tweet on June 19th, Trump used the word “infest” to describe immigrants entering the country. Like a good tribalist, Trump has no use for nuance such as the right to asylum. It’s either “us” or “them”; there can be no middle ground, no third category, no space for discussion, debate, or dialogue. The dangers of this way of thinking are obvious. I want to focus on one: tribal epistemology uses dehuma…
Read More…e Compact pushed for problem-solving at the federal level, discouraged the use of local law enforcement in profiling alleged “illegal immigrants,” opposed the unnecessary separation of families, and urged a simultaneously “humane” and “business-friendly” approach to immigration. The Church issued an additional statement urging comprehensive immigration reform to “balance love for neighbors, family cohesion, and the observance of just and enforceab…
Read More…amily issue we’ve seen so far in Preachers’ Daughters. (Having very beautiful teenage daughters and a camera crew in one’s home? Less so.) It’s one thing for a pastor to relate to someone whom s/he knows only as a member of his or her congregation. But what if that person is also a spouse’s client? Or a spouse’s boss? Or your relative? Or the friend of your kid? It can be really tricky, and requires a great deal of skill, character, compassion, an…
Read More…at sounded very exotic.” Nearly twenty years later, White found herself in Mexico, the wife of a young man she met at church soon after she enrolled at Baylor University, where the two would work as missionaries for a controversial charismatic group, since disbanded, the Maranatha Christian Church. When the couple returned to Texas twelve years later with their two children, they arrived during the heyday of the Christian Coalition takeover of the…
Read More…waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10. They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names…. They had all waived their right to…
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