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‘Religious Liberty’ and the Origins of the Evangelical Persecution Complex

By Randall J. Stephens

…hat has existed since antiquity will likely crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.” In apocalyptic tones reminiscent of fundamentalists in the 1960s, Dobson asserts: “Pastors may have to officiate at same-sex marriages, and they could be prohibited from preaching certain passages of Scripture.” Fifty years earlier Hargis felt similarly under siege. “If all our friends only knew the satanic pressures that are exerted against us…

For Unto (Some of) Us a Child is Born: Handel’s Messiah and the Voice of Empire Rising

By Peter Laarman

…h power against the always-worrisome threat of Catholic France. Across the western sea there remained a threat from Jacobite Irish Catholics, who had rallied behind the deposed James II. William made short work of this threat at 1690’s Battle of the Boyne: a victory that is still celebrated, as provocatively as possible, by Ulster’s Orange Order every July 12. All this history bears directly on the creation of Messiah, because the work was first p…

Are We Living Through World War III?

By Haroon Moghul

…that he would kill innocents in revenge for the innocent Syrians killed in Western airstrikes–it’s not clear that this was primarily, or exclusively, politically-motivated violence. A number of commentators seem to believe Mateen was struggling with his own sexuality. But Cohen does not hesitate to assign Mateen to larger, world-historical forces: Islam is in epochal crisis. Its Sunni and Shiite branches are mired in violent confrontation. Its adj…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…(There are no zombies in the Bible; the zombie is a creature that entered Western culture not through the ancient Near East or Europe, but through slavery, colonialism, and a profound Western misunderstanding of the Vodoun religion and Haitian culture.) What I was trying to do was get my students to think. To make connections between our pasts and our present, to wonder why humans are not so different today than the were 2000+ years ago, and—most…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…nary process,” Mendies told me. In the 70s and 80s, he explained, “we took western theology, packaged it, labeled it Christian, and we took it here and said: We’re going to make Christians. We brought western theology, not Christianity.” As Mendies sees it,the priorities of old-fashioned evangelism—where a premium was placed on the number of souls that were “saved”—have been supplanted in recent years by those of the social gospel, in which Christ…

From Empire to Shire: Rod Dreher’s Nostalgia for Middle-Earth

By Gustavo Maya

…ave wielded imperial power at all, nor does he discuss the long history of Western philosophical and theological reflection on empire and how to restrain the arbitrary power of ruling authorities. Christ, after all, was a victim of the Roman Empire. Attempting to maintain imperial control over Palestine, a colonial possession, Roman authorities charged Jesus with conspiring a revolt and subjected him to torture and execution. According to scriptur…

Forward Christian Europe!

By Ludger Viefhues-Bailey

…ho might have thought in Marxist terms but rejected a violent overthrow of Western society, as if to say If you agree with my analysis and if you share the sense of urgency, how can you stand at the sidelines and not engage in this all-defining struggle? In lacing together his own revolutionary theory with a number of more mainstream anti-Islamic texts, Breivik appeals not only to a slim network of extremists, but to those who claim that the “Isla…

Duterte Cites Catholic Heritage in Opposing Marriage Equality, and More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…y laws on its former colonies in the 19th century. “For the U.K. and other Western countries to turn round and try and impose the reverse is not appropriate, has moral questions around it, and is likely to get a whole range of countries to backlash against it,” he said in an interview. Earlier this month Malta Prime Minister Joseph Muscat called for Commonwealth countries to repeal colonial-era sodomy laws. Ivory Coast: Sentencing over ‘public ind…

What’s Rome Got to Do With It?: Bannon, Burke, and Douthat’s “Trumpian” Pope

By Patricia Miller

…There is a natural desire for a unifying theory of all the disturbances in Western institutions, a way to make all the conflicts into one so that an unstable situation can be distilled and understood. Which is why, over the last week, there’s been an attempt to unite American politics and Vatican intrigue into a single melodrama, in which the same populist forces that elevated Donald Trump are supposedly trying to pull Pope Francis down. Douthat c…

Staged Pussy Riot Trial Interrupted by Russian Authorities

By Chrissy Stroop

…e day the verdict was read out, continues both to attract the attention of Western intellectuals and artists and to be a thorn in the side of Russian authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church. Here in Russia, where a September poll revealed that 78% of the population found the Pussy Riot verdict either “appropriate” or “insufficient,” and only 14% found it “excessive,” there seems to be little hope for a meaningful dialogue between those on oppo…