Religion Dispatches
…nd demand, demand that your minister, your priest, your rabbi, your pastor talk about individual rights. If they don’t know them, tell them to pick up George Whitefield. Tell them to pick up the sermons. They are available online. They are available in bookstores everywhere. The sermons that led to the American Revolution, on individual rights. Please, I beg of you. These people will take over the Internet. These people will destroy talk radio. Th…
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…dea. It’s a theological idea for them. And so, in these circles, when they talk about abortion, they’re not talking about policy. […]The conversation is: Abortion in any form is a form of child sacrifice. That empowers demons to have more control over America. […] Abortion to them is an arena of spiritual combat [and] one of the prime drivers of demonic influence in America. Why are they at the Capitol on January 6th? To end abortion. Why are they…
Read More…en used to wedge exclusivist ideology, religion, and politics. When people talk of the Muslim ummah today, it is romantic. We are far too diverse for what they mean, which often includes a single interpretation of things which are much too complex. One of the passages I was reading refers to the ummah of the Book. I found that interesting. Interesting because I had to think, what it meant. Is it like the “people of the book” in the Qur’an, thereby…
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…ony for anyone who cares to listen. I think the fact that his message sounds so refreshing illustrates how crazy things have gotten in this country. He opposes war and he makes no judgments on anyone, but he doesn’t really want to talk about that. Rather, he just wants to talk about love. My favorite part of the video is when he tells me that his message is catching on – and that even some of the churches admit we should be talking about love inst…
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…ology Movie is that because Theroux couldn’t get anyone from the church to talk to him, he decides to investigate “the spirit of Scientology” by hiring actors to re-enact moments from church history, most notably the violent tirades of its current leader, David Miscavige. To make his fake movie, Theroux elicits the help of Marty Rathbun, a former high-ranking official in the Church of Scientology. Rathbun, for good reason, gets a lot of screen tim…
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…genda in the U.S.-run prison at Camp Bucca in Iraq. And if we are going to talk about violence and terror, we must not forget the wisdom of the late Coretta Scott King: Poverty can produce a most deadly kind of violence. In this society violence against poor people and minority groups is routine. I remind you that starving a child is violence; suppressing a culture is violence; neglecting schoolchildren is violence; discrimination against a workin…
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…hange. Even in “the reddest of states,” she said, “bishops are starting to talk to their members.” Yet organizing among mainline Protestant denominations, at least, has been fitful and episodic at best. Jim Winkler, president of the National Council of Churches, told me that NCC-type churches haven’t reached a “tipping point” of dealing in a meaningful way with gun violence. “A lot of it has to do with fear of upsetting people,” he said. In many c…
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…slipping into his high school football coach persona and ending with a pep talk. This is a stunning reversal of the political tendency in play since, well, at least as long as I can remember, which makes sense, given that I was born in 1980, the beginning of the “Reagan revolution.” That’s the year Republican nominee Ronald Reagan’s “great national crusade to make America great again” took the country by storm, and the Christian nationalist evange…
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…he book, several of which I wish I had written. One that stands out is Fat-Talk Nation, in which medical anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh explores the unseen costs of America’s “war on obesity” by asking: “How do heavy people feel being the object of such visceral hatred, verbal abuse, and outright discrimination?” To investigate this question, Greenhalgh had her college students write “auto-ethnographies” in which they reflected on the ways weight…
Read More…fearfulness that seems to be hanging over the state. People are afraid to talk out of fear that they will be harassed or create harassment for someone else. On Monday, a minister kicked me off a church parking lot for trying to talk to day laborers. Three years ago, U.S. District Judge James M. Munley wrote in the original decision: The genius of our Constitution is that it provides rights even to those who evoke the least sympathy from the gener…
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