Religion Dispatches
…tion behind one kind of Abstraction, but Sweeney tried to make museums themselves into more self-consciously spiritual spaces. Art as religion and museums as temples… these ideas make better sense if we are willing to loosen up our understanding of the word ‘religion’ and to broaden our sense of what counts as a “temple.” It is in this sense that the story this book tells fits in nicely with one of the main tasks of this magazine. Sweeney’s aesthe…
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…sports field for the airport, the revival meeting organized by Engle’s The Call kicked into high gear in support of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill. “The bill will be passed into law without any debate,” boomed James Nsaba Buturo, Uganda’s Minister for Ethics and Integrity, and a well-known backer of the bill, drawing cheers from the audience while Engle’s vehicle was still in view. “We must tell the whole world that Uganda will not accept that n…
Read More…thesis “simply stupid,” its conclusion “inexcusably moronic. . . ideological Birtherism.” At Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference on Friday (D’Souza delivered a speech on Saturday, which I missed, but which I understand was about this very topic) Gingrich trod on more familiar territory: that Obama doesn’t understand “American exceptionalism,” which in Gingrich’s view means that Obama doesn’t understand America’s divine roots. Lik…
Read More…ice of France, discovered the inlet into New York harbor and the island we call Manhattan, Henry Hudson, an Englishman under contract to the Dutch East India Company, nosed the Half Moon through the same Narrows and struggled north on the river that now bears his name. The first group of settlers to disembark in Manhattan were Walloons, French-speaking Belgians, followed shortly by a modest influx of Netherlanders, Germans and French. English Puri…
Read More…ublicans at GOProud when they invited her to headline their soiree they so self-deprecatingly called “Homocon.” Over the weekend, Coulter put on her bib and sharpened her knife and dove into a plate full of tender gay Republicans. TPM reported on Coulter’s appearance: After a series of jokes about conservative that sounded — and were received — more like a stand-up act then a political speech, Coulter told the assembled (and predominantly wealthy)…
Read More…together for her Christian audience. Setting the groundwork for her historical view on the formation of the nation, and reading from a prepared text, she touched on themes of the founding of the nation familiar to homeschoolers and Christian school students alike. Contrasting the formation of American with other countries, she said, “Most countries were born out of the ‘accident’ of history, wars, peace treaties, and the like,” but that America wa…
Read More…d a breathless report—based largely on the “reporting” of Patrick Poole, a self-styled “terrorism analyst” whose writings have appeared in conspiracy-minded publications like Front Page magazine—which asserted that the Congressional Muslim Staff Association has hosted speakers at its meetings who have “terror ties.” A similar report, written by Poole, who also claims to be “an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military,” first a…
Read More…s news channel, CBN News, was able to offer only one organization that has called for a probe of the Congressional Muslim Staff Association: Robertson’s own American Center for Law and Justice. As I’ve reported here and here, after Fox News ran a report claiming that speakers with terrorist ties spoke at Congressional prayer meetings, the ACLJ called for a Justice Department investigation of the CMSA. Suhail Khan, a Muslim Republican who has worke…
Read More…andate to act on any social issue, nor should it be interpreted as a political blank check… Already, there are Washington insiders and special interest groups that hope to co-opt the Tea Party’s message and use it to push their own agenda—particularly as it relates to social issues.” A new CNN poll shows that the authors of the letter are right in saying that the election was not a mandate for the Republicans. Of those polled 70 percent said their…
Read More…can “religion of the marketplace”? An especially fruitful approach to precisely this question was voiced by James Buchan in his extraordinary 1997 book, Frozen Desire: In the new world, first, there is no such thing as Providence, merely probability, which can be studied at the gaming table. Second, there is such a thing as usury: whatever Aristotle and the Gospels say, money is productive of more money, it does breed, and on Sunday, too… Third, t…
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