Religion Dispatches
…ing to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and justifying the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the ambivalences and valences of Abraham Lincoln’s invocation of God during the torturous American Civil War is miles away from current President Barack Obama’s easy evangelical sensibilities about faith in his God. God is My Homeboy Of course beyond all of these vexing theological questions on the political scene are the numerous ways the term is…
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…on international Christianity. Number five on the CT list: Christians flee Iraq and Gaza: About 13,000 Christians—or one in two—left Mosul in October. In Gaza, churches where hundreds worshiped until recently are attended by less than a dozen. Historic Christian communities are becoming history. 4.) TOP TEN ONION RELIGION STORIES: “Jewish Elders Lift Ham Ban.” For instance. 5.) TOP TEN ABUSES OF RELIGION DURING THE ELECTION SEASON The Interfaith A…
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…M. Hutchens of the Christian Zionist “Jerusalem Connection,” who has been promoting the piece. Why? Bartholomew: “I can see why Freund would enthuse over this, but it’s less clear why a conservative evangelical like Hutchens would want to promote the idea of 500,000 to 1 million Portuguese and Spaniards embracing a religion other than Christianity. Such are the mysteries of Christian Zionism.” Coral Ridge Ministries Produces Is Jesus God?: Since…
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…stalls queer rights, supports a ban on abortion, and sanctified the war in Iraq. Historically, only the defeat of this stream has served to expand democracy. (Sekou, 2009) This self-righteous attitude that takes aim at enemies who must be defeated has always been one of the temptations of the prophetic religious tradition, with its iconography of the lone, persecuted prophet. Taken to its extreme, this posture on the religious left can paradoxical…
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…who told me that she hasn’t been able to breathe since her nephew left for Iraq; who still goes to bed each night praying for a safe return. Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an Empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young men and women to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. Hope is what led me here today—w…
Read More…deflecting the public’s attention from the company’s countless killings in Iraq, it recently announced that Eric Prince (a former Navy SEAL who founded the firm in 1997) is stepping down in order to concentrate on other business opportunities. According to Scahill, Prince “sought to cast his departure as a natural part of the firm’s ‘ongoing evolution’: ‘As many of you know, because we focus on continually improving our business that Xe is in the…
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…nizing a much broader range of moral concerns: hunger, poverty, the War in Iraq, torture, and the environment. The fact that Chuck Colson and James Dobson and other old-guard leaders of the religious right sought to debunk global warming served as a kind of wake-up call for younger evangelicals, who recognized that they would have to deal with an issue so blithely dismissed by the religious right and the Republican Party. These younger evangelical…
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…int that the New Atheism crosses the line and undermines its own effort to promote critical thinking. The problem with an exclusively negative approach to religion is twofold. First, while it helps sell books, it risks promoting intolerance and potentially even hatred of religious people. Atheists will point out that they do not fly planes into buildings or murder doctors, as some religious fundamentalists have done. However, it takes one visit to…
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…occupation to end. Some of us marched against the Vietnam War and even the Iraq War. Some of us give money to help victims in Darfur and fund shelters for battered women here at home. Few of us can bring ourselves to say much out loud about the battering of an entire people, if we are within the Jewish communal tent. Until very recently, I was in that category, looking back on my own reactions to sundry allegations of bad behavior by Israel. “It h…
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…y his willfully ignorant evangelical base. An unnecessary war-of-choice in Iraq, “legalized” torture, a carelessly managed war in Afghanistan, little-to-no action to repair the earth’s environment, presidential sniping at evolution being taught in schools, an anti-sex education campaign, ties to the apocalyptic “End Times” evangelical/fundamentalist Christian Zionists (that skewed Bush’s Middle East politics toward the State of Israel in a way tha…
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