Religion Dispatches
…Listen to a podcast of the Ticket 2016, during which I talked about religion in the 2016 presidential campaign with Austin, Texas NPR affiliate KUT’s Ben Philpott and the Texas Tribune’s Jay Root:…
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…’ve never laid flowers at a veterans cemetery or followed troop deployment numbers. Doing so would not occur to most. Since the end of the draft and the initiation of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973, veterans have not been distributed widely through civilian communities, and Americans have allowed themselves to support the troops in a distant, spectatorial fashion that may signal gratitude or at least political correctness, but also underwrites a…
Read More…issues involving homosexuality, could pour into voting stations in record numbers to punch the Obama ticket—and then cast a vote for Proposition 8. To try and prevent this, Prop 8 opponents are holding informal educational sessions in black and Latino neighborhoods and talking with black clergy to try to sway the opinion of minority populations that have historically been hostile to LGBT rights—especially same-sex marriage. The stakes are high. B…
Read More…inding members that gaining entrance to heaven isn’t like buying a lottery ticket. There is no magic to it, no speaking in tongues, no handling snakes, no eternal security. You work hard here on Earth, quietly, diligently, to retire in eternity. Your works are an outward manifestation of your faith, and your faith is what saves you. A young woman wedged in behind an organ calls out, “Somebody pick a hymn,” and somebody else calls back, “How about…
Read More…ing Bob” La Follette, who ran for the White House on the Progressive party ticket, and whose journal survives to this day, headquartered down by the Essen Haus practically in the shadow of the Wisconsin state capitol. For those of us lucky enough to grow up in the “Moscow of the Midwest,” progressive could mean generally any non-communist member of the Old Left (it is a distressing artifact of my upbringing that I can parse far better than the ave…
Read More…confident that both the Republican Party platform and the Republican Party ticket in 2012 and the foreseeable future will be for the federal marriage amendment, for defining marriage as being between a man and a woman, and for the Defense of Marriage Act.” GOProud opposes the Defense of Marriage Act, but only because it believes decisions on gay marriage should be made at the state level. It does not, however take a position on the merits of gay m…
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…oil fields of Texas, but as a patriotic graduate I joined the military, my ticket out of Louisiana and an opportunity to explore the world. In my fourth year, having become a naval officer, I volunteered for shore duty in Vietnam which would become a turning point in my life. Never had I experienced such violence, suffering, and fear. In the madness of war, my faith became more important and I felt God was calling me to be a priest. I talked to a…
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…upted over this behavior, Nehlen responded by posting the names, telephone numbers, and email addresses of some of his critics. Nehlen’s so reviled that even Steve Bannon’s Breitbart has disavowed him, though no less accomplished a racist than Donald Trump himself praised Nehlen during the primary. Nehlen won’t come anywhere near unseating Ryan, of course, but that doesn’t mean the WisGOP—which appears not to have made any recent statements disavo…
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…about forever, of a very large share of the Black people living here, now numbering 42 million. As Malcolm X pointed out decades ago, it’s impossible to regard the United States as a nation of laws when those laws are very often suspended in the case of Black people. Malcolm believed, correctly, that a nation choosing to be only conditionally lawful cannot really be regarded as lawful at all—and should certainly stop its boasting about equal just…
Read More…paradigmatic free gift, is replaced by the massive edifice of Wall Street number-crunchers and their continual wagering on the future probabilities. As we all know, a lot of money has been made—and lost—this way. Which leads Buchan to his second point: money generates more money, even on Sunday. This is a subtler point, one that he develops specifically in relation to the invention of paper money—money, that is to say, with absolutely nothing to…
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