Religion Dispatches
…ire-in-the-belly of a Donnie Osmond. His greatest hits? “Nancy Pelosi’s numbers have being going down a chute faster than a Jet Blue flight attendant” and “President Obama’s idea of a rogue state is Arizona.” As for the substance of Romney’s speech, what was most notable was the absence of talk about values, let alone religion. Instead, Romney sounded every bit the corporate buyout and turnaround specialist, criticizing the “anti-growth,” “…
Read More…I to judge?” statement while aboard the papal plane. Since that fateful in-flight press conference, I have been told countless times (often by well-meaning, heterosexual Catholics) that I should find hope and comfort in the pope because he has opened up the doors to mercy for me and my lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer friends. But mercy, it seems to me, is not the door that LGBTQ people need opened to them. Mercy is an act of love, co…
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…n linked to a denial of the Holocaust or the anti-Semitism that led to the flight of some one million Jews from Arab countries between 1947 and 1967. When Prime Minister Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, and other right-wing extremists are able to point to this irrational hatred of the Jewish people as the “real” underlying message of the critics of The Occupation, they stir up fears among Israelis that seem to be rationally founded, given the hatred…
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…ticulturalism” that’s led to a “pathological” form of “self-hatred” and “a flight from one’s own heritage.” Throughout Benedict’s narrative, from the Holy Roman Empire through the Crusades and contemporary Europe, Islam represents Europe’s threatening, external other. Benedict’s account of European history, as Columbia University’s Joseph A. Massad writes, “recode[s] European forms of despotism as democracy”—for example, portraying the Crusades as…
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…hecking their watches, making sure that they wouldn’t miss their afternoon flights to Reagan National. Warren, the Goofy, Goateed High School English Teacher Finally, after more than two hours of tracing the path from the bus boycott to “Yes, we can,” it was Warren time. To his credit, Farris introduced Warren by addressing directly the controversies surrounding his stands against same-sex marriage and abortion. He noted that Warren’s stances on p…
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…mistreated women, to children forced to work. –In yet another impromptu in-flight press conference, Pope Francis said in June that Christians should apologize to gay people and others the church has mistreated. Today, children are taught this at school: that everyone can choose their own sex. And why do they teach this? Because the books come from those people and institutions who give money. –In a meeting with Polish bishops on World Youth Day, F…
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…zed American political atmosphere one wonders if there is any way—polite or impolite—to conduct a serious public conversation about the Middle East in general, and about Israel in particular The clash between Arun Gandhi and the American Jewish leadership, Israeli intellectuals, and American Christian supporters of Zionism may have been inevitable. Sadly, this was a noisy and ugly clash, not worthy of the tradition of exchange and dialogue that pr…
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…lues, values which Philip Gorski, in his recent and impassioned defense of American civil religion, American Covenant, expands beyond simply freedom to include equality, “national solidarity (‘We, the People, in order to form a more perfect union’), the common good (or ‘general welfare’) and active citizenship,” suggesting that “civic inclusion and recognition should perhaps be added to our national creed as well.” Tyranny isn’t merely the opposit…
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…the ways in which the idea of God’s chosen people morphs into the idea of American exceptionalism—at times underwriting American imperialistic tendencies. Feiler’s now-formulaic promotion of a biblical figure to resolve conflicts at the intersections of religion and politics may be a successful recipe for book sales. But one wishes that Feiler would use his literary gifts to tell a more complicated story of the interweaving of religion and politi…
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…world’s cultural authenticity. Meanwhile, African leaders purport to fight Americanization by aligning with some of the most powerful and chauvinistic of American religious leaders, and even taking US government money. “When it comes to homosexuality… many African religious leaders view progressive social witness on LGBT equality as a ‘Western agenda,’” writes Kaoma. “In many respects, their denunciation of homosexuality is an attack on the West r…
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