Religion Dispatches
…nia only happened fifteen years ago; I wish I could buy my interlocutors a ticket to Sarajevo, and answer them only after their visit. We should not forget that Europe’s violent spasms ended but very recently, and with the death of those generations who intimately recall Nazism and the Holocaust, Soviet Communism and the Gulag, it is possible the temptation to return to ugly ideologies will only increase. Recently, the Boston Review covered the ri…
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…museum in our sense of that word—anyone, male or female, could purchase a ticket on any day the museum was open, and wander freely among the nude statues of pagan deities. Then, just twenty years later in 1754, Pope Benedict XIV created the “Naked Academy” (l’Accademia del Nudo) inside the very palace where the Capitoline collection was housed. The idea was to promote the fine arts, by providing a space in which contemporary artists could sketch…
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…banks, using bailout money to hire throngs of lobbyists to write their own ticket. Take the Chrysler mess. This week’s hot business story, in case you missed it, is about bankers and hedge funds—again including some bailout beneficiaries—wanting to pull Chrysler over the brink into a bankruptcy that would be catastrophic for workers and communities across a huge swath of the country. Why were they demanding bankruptcy? Because their bonds would be…
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…onal Review as its publisher in 1957. By the mid-1950s, then, there were a number of conservative periodicals, publishing houses, and radio shows. And they weren’t just isolated outlets scattered across the country. They were intimately connected through overlapping donors, personnel, and relationships. Regnery was an early sponsor of the Manion Forum. Manion sat on the board of National Weekly, which oversaw National Review. Editors at Human Even…
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…gelicals, Mormons, and Catholics to the polls in support of the Republican ticket at percentages the GOP hasn’t seen in years. Combined with vice-president-elect Mike Pence’s proud history of support for anti-LGBT, anti-women “religious freedom” legislation, it’s clear the incoming administration owes a debt to white religiously conservative America. Anyone unwilling to see that and brace for the ways that debt will be repaid is living under a roc…
Read More…es minded” evangelical Christians are flocking away from the GOP in strong numbers—have they really moderated their political thinking? Sure, many evangelical churches, led by that 18-29 year old group, have dedicated themselves to such liberal causes as the environment and even moderated their positions on gays and lesbians—but overall, the evangelical landscape hasn’t changed all that much. Leaders at 44 percent of the congregations called their…
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…to continue to shrink into the insularity and disorganization that caused the Philadelphia Archdiocese to decline so precipitously? It remains to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I…
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…the Republican base. So why pander? We should recall that the McCain/Palin ticket has said they would not sit down with the prime minister of Spain, a member in good standing of NATO. And yet, they go out of their way, as do the Democrats, to meet with Israel’s surrogates in Washington regularly (each candidate spoke at a zealously pro-Israel AIPAC meeting and of the five groups Palin met with on a recent trip to Washington, one was AIPAC) and to…
Read More…umstances, and who has changed his mind after Sarah Palin was named to the ticket—accused Obama of “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview,” and having a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.” Last week, Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink.com ran a piece by Robert George that claimed that Obama “is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever”, “the most extreme pro-abortion member of th…
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…“Justice Sunday II” rally; in 2008 he not only supported the McCain/Palin ticket, but was a frequent and vocal supporter of California’s Proposition 8 and co-authored “Personal Faith Public Policy” with the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. In late December, after then President-elect Barack Obama chose Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation, the senior pastor of the 3000-member Hope Christian Church in Prince George’s Count…
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