Religion Dispatches
…e of presidential politics, like it or not, perhaps the second slot on the ticket is aiming too low. Why not “Jeremiah Wright for President”? Age is not a problem. He’s six years younger than the oldest candidate, whose age has not stopped him from running neck-and-neck with his Democratic opponents. Racial identity is not a problem. He shares the same African-American identity as a candidate who is running neck-and-neck with his prospective Repub…
Read More…party types who will now turn out enthusiastically. It adds pizzazz to the ticket. An ideological firebrand is the one thing Romney has never been accused of being, and now he can borrow that heat. I believe that Romney or the people close to him pushed Romney for some of these reasons—including getting past the Mormon moment and the focus on Romney’s character. The persistent question about Romney has been: who is this man? What made him who he i…
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…tched around several city blocks, districts that were used to double-digit numbers were overwhelmed with thousands of participants, and the vast majority were adamant Sanders supporters. The night was unprecedented in the modern Mormon world. https://twitter.com/sltrib/status/710953531021221888 Close observers expected the “Mormon Vote” to go Sanders’s way—the latest polling had him up eight points, Sanders held huge rallies in both states, and Hi…
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…battles over religion and science. Fundamentalist Fervor According to Ron Numbers, in his book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America didn’t really start in earnest until the early 1900s. For the most part, Christians were not biblical literalists and accepted science—including the ideas that the earth was very old and that living creatures changed through time. A typic…
Read More…o go awry as soon as I arrived at the Met. I had pre-purchased my entrance ticket and the audio tour, only to find out that there was no audio tour. Things did not improve. I started in the Byzantine galley where five gold and silver metal mesh Versace dresses were on display, only they were placed above eye level, making it feel like I was peeking up the mannequins’ skirts. I see London, I see France, I see Versace’s underpants. The crush of peop…
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…Joe Biden impersonation can’t compensate for this defect at the top of the ticket. No number of morally-impassioned surrogates can compensate. We should not forget that a widely-shared yearning for a moral revolution formed the heart of the Sanders movement. We shouldn’t forget that this surge of moral energy surprised the Vermont senator himself, or that it was really a remarkable thing to behold, especially considering the many liabilities of th…
Read More…t, help the least of these all you want, but nothing you do will buy you a ticket to heaven. You can do all these things and be ever so nice, but if you don’t believe Jesus died for your sins, you’re going to hell.” To those who feel that way I say this: Call those pursuing social justice in this world heretics and deface billboards if it makes you feel better about neglecting the poor and suffering. But I think that Jesus could give two flips abo…
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…re, then we’re going to have to pack our bags, get that passport, buy that ticket, and see it all with our own eyes. This may be a challenging proposition, especially amid an economic downturn, but it is our absolute obligation as the world’s sole—if teetering—superpower. If we want to be in the driver’s seat of a globalized planet, we must know where the road is. Saving the World from the United States Last week, Sarah Palin, a woman who has scar…
Read More…in Lexington, Kentucky told Signorile that he voted a straight Republican ticket to “send a message” to the Democrats for not doing enough to advance LGBT rights. “I want to see the Democrats take a big beating like the Republicans did,” Jim said. “so maybe in the future they’ll wake up and start doing what they promised.” “But do you think that Rand Paul is going to do something for gay rights and that Republicans are?” asked Signorile about the…
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…re that anti-Semitism remains at a low flame while we wait for the winning ticket. There’s an old Jewish-Hungarian adage that says, “Anti-Semitism is when the goyim hate the Jews too much.” I articulate this position not because I agree with it but because I think it underlies much of what we are struggling with, from the bedbug tweetstorm to Bari Weiss’ “greatest hits of anti-Semitism” book. The neo-Nazis are the anti-Semites we know; the progres…
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