Religion Dispatches
…s not make a person wicked. Only having the power to change things for the better and using it to change them for the worse can make a person wicked. In short, I moved to the left because I gave you more credit than many of you give yourselves. Yes, I know some of you are scoundrels; what I don’t know is whether some of the activists I’ve met would be any better in your tailor-made shoes. Yet it is you who abide the slander whenever someone cl…
Read More…) to potentially controversial (adoption and LGBT issues). But it’s a safe bet this community didn’t expect a “best blog” competition to devolve into a witch hunt—literally. The “Faith Blog” category seemed dominated by homeschooling, “Biblical Womanhood,” “Biblical Patriarchy,” and so-called family values moms, and who apparently thought they own the category of faith (though Circle of Moms doesn’t exhibit any signs of being explicitly religious)…
Read More…l, and hard work. With just enough walk-shoveling. That was always a risky bet for a wonky Yankee Mormon. And evidence suggests that it hasn’t worked: evangelical Christians are consolidating behind Rick Santorum. Had Romney not spent the entire first part of his candidacy trying to pass himself off as a regular Christian conservative, he might be in a position to state the obvious: to take the Republican party by the shoulders and make the case t…
Read More…: “Amen! I didn’t used to think so but I do now.” We’ve seen Cameron speak out against homosexuality and embrace the far right agenda by speaking at CPAC, but and it remains to be seen if he’ll embrace the rest of the “biblical worldview” promoted by Vision Forum and Christian Reconstruction: biblical patriarchy, eliminating public education, and any public assistance for the poor, etc. In any case I’ll bet that Monumental will be a contender for…
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…bedroom. It’s actually a fairly powerful rhetoric, a sexy argument that I bet Rousseau would have bought into. I think that rhetoric may be more powerful for men. Being seen as the “animal” of humankind really isn’t a compliment. I just keep thinking “Reacquaint yourselves with Rosemary’s Baby, women of America, because if the right wing has their way, we’ll all be heading for housecoats and unlimited childbearing which we will allegedly turn out…
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…ilding up while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet—and that they’ve betrayed their loyalty to the group. (“Is Mitt Romney really one us?”, every Obama ad seems to ask.) Many in the Democrats’ activist base are well to the left of Obama and have long been skeptical about, or outright rejected, the big three values of the right (as Haidt so often complains). Even many who hold them as private values are often resistant to making them a basis…
Read More…ll, tax-paying citizens of the United States of America, you can damn well bet it is a civil rights movement. Nobody copyrighted the phrase, and nobody can, on one hand say, “Yes, we see that you’re being wronged,” and then say, “but you have no right to work for your civil rights, or to call it a ‘civil rights’ movement.” But the SBC certainly does want it both ways. They work in their “love the sinner, hate the sin” philosophy by being clear tha…
Read More…ntegrity of the study. But politically, the integrity of the study may be beside the point. The Witherspoon Foundation and Bradley Foundation apparently wanted a weapon they could use to fight marriage equality and they got it. It’s a safe bet that the Regnerus study will be cited by religious right groups for years to come, the way they have over the past decade cited a horribly flawed study of “ex-gays” by Dr. Robert Spitzer—even after Spitzer a…
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…s videos about Entebbe and memories of Munich in 1972 accompanied the alef-bet. In the way that both children and adults sometimes do, I took the car as a sign that we were not safe because we were different. As Jay Michaelson argues, we can “recognize millennial thinking in our own minds,” and mine seemed to always expect—briefly, quite irrationally—an undoing of the world. I imagined armed men entering the quiet sanctuary, always marking the nea…
Read More…mockery he has now attracted, this relatively obscure congressman whom I’d bet half the pundits discussing his fate today had barely heard of before his primary win, is a National Superstar, the very embodiment of the Christian Right’s all-too-often abandoned determination to stand up to GOP pols who forever pay them lip service but rarely deliver the goods. […] And if he does win, he will enter the Senate next year not as some random wingnut dude…
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