Religion Dispatches
Some two-and-a-half years ago, I wrote an essay for this magazine, titled “Secular Good, Muslim Bad“. It was a reflection on the initial protests which became the Arab Spring, before the counterrevolution kicked in and turned a hopeful cry for breathing room into a demented Arab Spring Cleaning. The vermin are fellow Arabs, demonized and derided for years, such that their blood becomes cheap. This happens all too often with minorities; what is u…
Read More…ews that a child has died. But when I heard about Martin Richard, the eight-year-old bombing victim, my mind did what human brains do—tried to explain the incomprehensible in terms of the familiar—and discovered to its horror that there was a lot that seemed familiar. From Martin Richard’s gap-toothed grin, to the way his “No More Hurting People” sign was clearly carefully printed yet switched between upper and lower case, to the long eyelashes th…
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…Village Voice. In “Toward a New Definition of Obscenity,” Moody, who had by 1965 screened banned films in church and registered voters in the South, wrote that: For Christians the truly obscene ought not to be slick-paper nudity, nor the vulgarities of dirty old or young literati, nor even ‘weirdo’ films showing transvestite orgies or male genitalia. What is obscene is that material, whether sexual or not, that has as its basic motivation and purp…
Read More…was a statement that shocked the world with its compassion, but the follow-up proved that it was not a change in church teaching. In September of 2013, in an interview with Rev. Anthony Spadaro, Pope Francis made clear that he is a “Son of the Church” on matters regarding the Church’s catechism on homosexuality, abortion and contraception—but that “the dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral minist…
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…your chances of winning—and you should. This country is basically a center-right to center-left country and if we could rotate a competent center-right with a competent-center left person then I think we’d have a healthy country. I think your book could help people make a critical assessment of how religion is being used in politics because if they understood the Bible then they would recognize when it’s being misused and abused. It seems to me…
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…rack Obama is an American by birth, at heart the president is still an anti-American Communist, socialist, Marxist, and Muslim sympathizer who supports abortion and his anti-colonialist father’s dream of stripping rich nations of their wealth. In D’Souza’s nightmare vision, if we elect Obama to another four-year term, by 2016 we will have the United States of Islam. D’Souza, an Indian immigrant, spends a considerable amount of time at the beginnin…
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…the old evangelical “WWJD” fad in promotional materials—thanks for the not-at-all annoying reminder that I wore those cringe cloth bracelets in the 1990s, my dudes—I hoped the film itself would focus less on efforts to “save” Christianity and more on the very real threat to our democracy from authoritarian Christians. Unfortunately, the WWJD invocation was a tell. At the end of the day, God & Country is more concerned with laundering the reputati…
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…ound their rituals the subject of ridicule. They were suspected of being un-American, loyal to the Pope, incapable of liberty. At times Catholics were prevented from holding public office. In the mid-nineteenth century, while the number of Catholic hospitals was growing, the Know Nothing party organized around shared fears that Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany were overwhelming the country and acting against white Protestant interests….
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…opening to a speech that could only be made by an immensely privileged, out-of-touch individual. Biden went on to hit many notes that are alienating to secular Americans and much of the Democratic base, sacralizing American political life and calling for “unity” and “comity” with those who want to deprive the marginalized of their rights. Gushing over the NPB itself, Biden stated that he was “honored to continue the tradition started by President…
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…adio broadcasts of crackpot preacher Garner Ted Armstrong. And really, what 12-year-old kid living on an isolated Wisconsin farm would not be thrilled to learn that the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel later evolved into Angles and Saxons? Not to mention that the Stone of Scone used in British coronations over the centuries is the self-same stone that was used at the coronation of King David? I remember that Garner Ted’s manner regarding this malarkey wa…
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