Religion Dispatches
…rted references to the history of the oppression of gay people, as in Nazi Germany and under the thumb of oppressive laws and Christian fundamentalism in the United States. But the vision of this movement could have been elaborated more clearly with a gesture toward Harry Hay, an earlier “father of gay liberation” who was doubtless an influence on Milk. Hay’s argument that homosexuals are in fact “a people” with a purpose in society is a message i…
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…t via their own offspring?” Vance and Masters have both not been shy about promoting their openly anti-democratic aspirations. Both have ties to right-wing extremist blogger Curtis Yarvin, a raging monarchist. Vance supports the governing model of Caesarism, which has risen to prominence on the American Right in recent years, claiming: “We are in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wi…
Read More…Fifteen hundred years later still, when European travelers (from England, Germany and elsewhere) made Rome the main stop on their “Grand Tour,” a new problem emerged in this Christian imperial center, now dominated by the Vatican: what to do when many of them died, and died outside of the Catholic faith? There was quite literally nowhere to bury these unsettling, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox corpses. So a new, Acattolica (non-Catholic) cemeter…
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…0 people in the Facebook group “Chilean Miners,” for instance (people from Germany, Ireland, Argentina, Canada, Ohio, Wyoming, and so on) were watching the live feed from the mine in their homes, workplaces, cafes and other distributed locales, but praying together for the miners, sharing news from their parts of the world, and, in general, witnessing and ministering to one another throughout the day. It’s hard to tell where all this might lead. P…
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…evidence as the advancing Allied armies captured camps. With the armies in Germany were four Life photographers whose pictures are presented on these pages. The things they show are horrible. They are printed for the reason stated seven years ago when, in publishing early pictures of war’s death and destruction in Spain and China, Life stated, “Dead men have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them.” This last line is crucial, and a…
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…he Christian Post, the subject of an intense investigation by Christianity Today (which was founded by the elder Graham), was also the venue for a Romney endorsement by Richard Land, who serves as the magazine’s executive editor. CT’s investigation of CP was no mere matter of Christian media competition: the man really at the helm of CP, David Jang, reportedly has a history with the Unification Church, and may have claimed to the Second Coming of…
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…scape painting became one of the great vehicles. Casper David Friedrich in Germany, Francisco Goya in Spain, and William Blake and JMW Turner in England are among the best known. Across the Atlantic the Hudson River School of Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Thomas Cole followed their European counterparts as Westward expansion and continental colonization revealed dramatic new visions of nature: the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, the Rockies…
Read More…f those pesky little voices from unholy and sinful nations like France and Germany. We could find ourselves demanding that other nations follow our commandments and dictates because we know better than they about how they should live their lives. We could find ourselves believing—as George W. Bush blasphemously declared during his 2003 State of the Union Address—that the American people have replaced Jesus with their “power, wonder-working power.”…
Read More…ow his father had “compared America and its legalized abortion to Hitler’s Germany and said that whatever tactics would have been morally justified in removing Hitler would be justified in trying to stop abortion.” And Frank Schaeffer also noted, quoting from his own book: “Angry speech has become the norm in American religion from both the right and the left. Words are spoken which, when taken seriously, lead directly to violence by the unhinged…
Read More…d as a “crucial example” for anybody? They had enough problems in interwar Germany. But Reitter’s goal, thankfully, is not to resurrect these idiosyncratic notions of Jewish self-hatred. Instead he wants to correct misconceptions about “terminological differences.” His arguments are convincing; however, while the book is short, readable, and enlightening, it is a work of scholarship—Reitter assumes that the reader is familiar with the previous wor…
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