Religion Dispatches
…associated with the name, from the pious side of McCarthyism to the War in Iraq, is their fault. Somehow, even in their midst, “we” are something else. And here lurks the danger in a master narrative: it promises a means of distinction between those who belong to it and those who don’t, as if the spiritual sons and daughters of Jonathan Edwards have inherited a special chamber in their hearts. But the truth is, especially in a country like this on…
Read More…ned, all the examples that first came to mind started with the letter “I”: Iraq, Israel, India, Indonesia. Of course I quickly thought of exceptions to the rule, like Lebanon, Sri Lanka—and the United States of America. Europeans tell us that they don’t understand why we insist on bringing religion into politics. Their situation is certainly different from ours; according to a 2005 poll, only about half of the people in EU member countries “believ…
Read More…’s red Prada shoes and designer sunglasses than about his criticism of the Iraq war. This time around in Washington DC and New York City, we hear about the “Pope-Soap-On-A-Rope” but not the people who work in Catholic schools for low wages. We see T-shirts for papal teddy bears, but no hint of the impact of the Vatican’s policy banning the use of condoms, even for those who are HIV-infected. Whether it is a Sunday morning talk show, the front page…
Read More…k like a loser. Will McCain take that risk? Or will he count on God, a winner by definition, to shore up his claim that American troops in Iraq are also winning? It’s something to watch for….
Read More…d regiment. Make no mistake: this is a movie about the invisibility of the Iraq war. We live oblivious to the reality of war, and in Cloverfield, that chicken comes home to roost. We deserve it, the film says, because it’s already happening and we pretend it isn’t. Late in the film one character exclaims, “I don’t know why this is happening”—that very obliviousness is the reflexive cause. Of course, the movie isn’t all Pat Robertson polemic. The c…
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…d a mother of a child who was on the ground in the “shock and awe” days in Iraq. My son is a veteran, and I myself am a veteran. So you imagine the challenges that I had when I saw our police forces being militarized on the streets of Ferguson, and I saw civilians running from tear gas. As a veteran and as a womanist and as a child of the ’60s Black Power movement, I knew that I could no longer comfortably sit in my office in Boston and be at my h…
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…who told me that she hasn’t been able to breathe since her nephew left for Iraq; who still goes to bed each night praying for a safe return. Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an Empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young men and women to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. Hope is what led me here today—w…
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…nizing a much broader range of moral concerns: hunger, poverty, the War in Iraq, torture, and the environment. The fact that Chuck Colson and James Dobson and other old-guard leaders of the religious right sought to debunk global warming served as a kind of wake-up call for younger evangelicals, who recognized that they would have to deal with an issue so blithely dismissed by the religious right and the Republican Party. These younger evangelical…
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…mpire’s Workshop (Metropolitan, 2006) documents Bush/Cheney building their Iraq policies on Central American precedents from this era. 4) Robertson fuses with News Corp. Robertson built what was once the nation’s fourth-largest television network—partly through claiming tax breaks as a religious ministry. Then he cashed in when Rupert Murdoch acquired what was then known as The Family Channel. This story has two morals: The first is that Fox News…
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…at their mercy. Given the ongoing United States military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan, drone bombings in Pakistan and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, there are far more relevant pretexts available than an Ivy League book that may not even warrant review in major newspapers. The peddlers of Islamophobia in the media, popular trade books, and blogs would have us believe that radical extremists are lurking everywhere just waiting for an ex…
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