Religion Dispatches
…of televangelism. As the campaign enters the final days, Candidate Romney increasingly exhorts his audiences to dare to have faith in the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11.1), to dare to imagine a whole new life for themselves under this very rich man’s care, to dare to believe in the Gospel of Wealth, and to be saved, finally, from real-world lives that are going nowhere in the $10/hour economy. Watching R…
Read More…tion is a ruse. It’s the Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry. (Oh, and incidentally: Eliot Spitzer?! Surely he was included in the ECI video not because of his non-existent leadership position, but because, like Bill Clinton, he makes some people feel that Democrats are sleazy. This confirms that the real point of the video is not to bash Occupy but to attack Obama, Pelosi, and the Democrats.) Personally, I find it nauseating that millions of d…
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…ave left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two important ways. One is the unprecedented ideological polarization of the church. There are today two distinct Catholic populations: one progressive-leaning population that supports the church’s social justice mission and the pope’s call for environmental stewardship, but largely…
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…d this sale to a long list of complaints: rules and more rules, opaque finances, increasing law enforcement presence, and more “spectators” in RV comfort palaces running noisy generators. Burners are a suspicious lot and many of them believe the Borg has caved in to the very values of corporate America that it seeks to challenge. Before entering the city I was reminded about why there is so much criticism of the organizers. Hundreds of us waited a…
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…he use of mifepristone in the United States through the 10th week of pregnancy). The abortion pill has become increasingly common in the US, with its use accounting for over 50% of all abortions in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Both efforts by red states—the banning of interstate travel and preventing the mailing of abortion pills—face obstacles. While the Supreme Court has recognized that there’s a constitutionally protected right…
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…en Homeland Security began to impose “threat levels” that legitimized the increase in surveillance and control after 9/11, we’ve become used to (and yet also entirely unprepared for) moments of fear and terror. Being frequently put on notice for potential terrorist activity now feels normal, but under the surface of normality hides a heightened sense of insecurity, of fraying bonds of trust. I was at Gate 4 in JFK’s Terminal 1 when a wave of peopl…
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…ven more hideous. The melody disappeared entirely to make way for the announcer’s voiceover—“Please make sure your phone and all electronics are switched off and stowed”—as a single chord hovered to a simple four-beat pulse in the fashion of light pop radio. Gone were the jaunty, urbane syncopations that will forever mark the arrival of the jazz idiom—and with it the bluesy sinews of the American soul—to the hallowed halls of Western art music, sm…
Read More…just nervous, okay? So when I finally got up the nerve to call the tour agency about my visa process, the woman said, “you got the visa, but since your passport was submitted late, we don’t have it back yet, but you got the visa.” !!!! I know she said more, something about the package. But I just wanted to get off the phone, so I could say out loud a soft, “yes!”, make a silent prayer of gratitude, and then just cry a little. I dressed in white to…
Read More…asure that passed here in 2008; the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, an offshoot of the American Principles Project, founded by Manhattan Declaration author Robert George; the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; Personhood USA, the national organization pushing ballot measures declaring fertilized eggs persons; and Champion the Vote, the get-out-the-vote project of United in Purpose, the non-profit organization funded…
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…world by 1980. He gave $1 million to help start the Moral Majority and financed the founding of Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy in 1981. Hunt also tried to buy all the world’s silver as a hedge against the financial collapse he believed the Bible predicted. He lost $1.7 billion and went bankrupt in 1989. He died at 88. Johnny Lee Clary A Ku Klux Klan leader who rejected racism and became a pentecostal evangelist, Johnny Lee Clary died at…
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