Religion Dispatches
…From blues to bluegrass, it’s a music tradition steeped in faith and religion. Nobody better exemplified the gospel tradition and pretty mountain harmonies than the Louvin Brothers. I got to see Charlie Louvin perform in Nashville a couple years back in a bar packed with young 20-something hipsters, all of them in awe over seeing this gospel icon in person. Who says young kids today don’t appreciate great music? Video after the jump….
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…mepage was linked to a speech Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was giving in Nashville. Pompeo is an outspoken evangelical who has said in the past that world conflicts, especially in the Middle East, will continue until the Rapture. The Rapture is, according to many evangelicals, an apocalyptic event when Christians will suddenly disappear from earth as God ushers in the end of all things. Barr’s war on secularism and Pompeo’s end-times infused dip…
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…e on the Bible, the Boss, and the Backwoods Barbie: sin and salvation from Nashville to New Jersey?) The folks behind Church Basement Roadshow do get specific about theology, and since they were good enough to show up at my synagogue Saturday morning (noshing not davening), I wanted to end this update on religion and culture with a mention of their project. Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt,and Mark Scandrette are three leaders of the emergent church moveme…
Read More…icals of color to change course. But not everyone is leaving. As a growing number of minorities redefine their associations, many have chosen to see white evangelical spaces as their “mission field,” but not their source of spiritual nourishment. These days, SueAnn Shiah just gets angry during church sermons. Still, the Taiwanese American congregant at a conservative, white church in Nashville, remains committed to serving on the church’s racial j…
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…e delivered Wednesday at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville. NRB is an international evangelical organization whose board members include John Fuller of far-right powerhouse Focus on the Family and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, a Southern Poverty Law Center designated anti-LGBT hate group. Featuring predictable dog whistles about “federalism” (i.e., “states’ rights”) and “the corporate—or ‘mainstream’—pre…
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…, at the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) in Nashville. At this year’s convention of the NRB—a leading international network of evangelical media outlets with a combined audience in the hundreds of millions—an Israeli ambulance was parked on the convention floor; attendees could watch gruesome footage of the October 7 attacks on virtual headsets; Israeli government officials and hostage families were in ample attendan…
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…ific terrorist attacks in Paris, Al-Aqsa mosque in Philadelphia received a phone message stating, “I hope you people are happy about what you did in Paris. I’d like to state for the record that Allah is a piece of pork shit.” A few weeks later, in the early morning hours of December 7, the mosque manager unlocked the front doors for the early morning fajr prayer. As he was about to enter, he noticed the severed head of a pig lying next to the door…
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…y came of it… [Crutcher’s] efforts were, however, carried out over the telephone and the conversations were primarily with receptionists. Rose takes the effort farther. Video is far more compelling than recordings of phone calls. According to the Los Angeles Times: Rose, the third of eight children, grew up in San Jose. Her father is an engineer for Sun Microsystems. She was home schooled… and also attended a part-time Christian school and a junio…
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…The local police, state police, and reporters from Kentucky, Indiana, and Tennessee were mounting simultaneous inquiries. Sightseers and investigators tromped around the farmhouse, marveled at the shattered windows, gathered bullet casings and snapped twigs from the trees where the creatures had perched. All this might imply that the Hopkinsville incident was utterly novel—but it wasn’t. Extraterrestrial encounters were common fare in the media o…
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…ies. (Fortunately, those provocative acts didn’t become a trend). In 2019, Tennessee tent revivalist Greg Locke burned a copy of RD senior correspondent Andrew L. Seidel’s The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American. But Locke did not stop there. NBC News reported that in February 2022 Locke staged a massive book burning in which he called on parishioners to hurl “demonic” materials like Harry Potter and Twilight books and films in…
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