Religion Dispatches
…f the callers who expressed their New York Democratic glee, a conservative Republican who had voted for John McCain called in to say that while he was driving home after the election, he thought about the fact that when he was born in the early 1960s, many African Americans were not allowed to vote and their children were attacked by dogs and with fire hoses for trying to go to school. Remembering that, he realized that there was reason to celebra…
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…Security Policy and its president, Frank Gaffney, indeed are respected and promoted in certain circles, in 2011 Gaffney was banished from the Conservative Political Action Conference because American Conservative Union board members considered him a “crazy bigot” who made the tin foil hat charge that the board had been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. At the conference, a Center for Security Policy employee handed out a flyer that described…
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…away with by the Sunni Ottoman Caliphate, not Iran. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic of Iran dates to and marks its independence on April 1, 1979. Iran is, of course, an ancient civilization, but up until the 1500s, Iran was a majority-Sunni country, until the Safavid dynasty, originating in the Caucasus, forcibly converted Iran to Twelver Shi’a Islam. How this paragraph passed muster is not beyond me, though. We’ve a tendency to prefer lazy stereo…
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…t, if there is this sense in those newly expanded liberal circles that the Republican Party is broken, shattered from within, there remains dangerous confusion about its rank and file. Democrats hope and declare that the Christian Right is a spent force, Timeexclaims that it’s now the Democrats who get religion, and faith-based advisors counsel the party that it will win evangelical voters, stripped of their former heroes, if only it avoid unseeml…
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…to meet the needs or answer the questions most of us have. Religion in the Republic of Ireland cannot avoid this any more, and even the Archbishop of Dublin says that he knows the Church needs a “reality check.” In the North, however, where space to talk about these things was squeezed out for so long by the Troubles, we’ve only just begun to have a public conversation about pluralism, and hardly even started to talk about the possibility that LGB…
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…allegiance to the . . . ,” he pauses. The crowd eagerly follows his lead, “republic”—a line popularized by the far-right John Birch Society. Like nearly every speaker at the conference, Hice goes for the low hanging fruit. “We thought that gay marriage was the end of the world,” he sets us up. “Now we have people in congress who cannot define the difference between a man and a woman. Just insanity.” We hear hisses from the crowd for the first time…
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…. LLDM pastors sometimes refer to the Church as the república del salvador—republic of the savior—and to the congregants as un nuevo Israel and un pueblo—a people. That seems about right. In many ways, the church functions like a kind of landless state, with baptism as its passport. It comes equipped with dynastic royalty, a capital, and a shimmering white palace. Immigrants, too, can be citizens, wherever they may be. Back in Chattanooga, I chatt…
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…epresentatives Committee on International Relations on September 14, 2006, Republican Henry Hyde and Democratic member Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, both expressed their concerns about Japan’s “historical amnesia.” In their statements, they urged future prime ministers to avoid visits to the shrine out of concern for peace in the region, and urged them to do something about Yushukan, the museum adjacent to the shrine, which promotes a revision…
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…all corners of the universe. In Pullman’s story, this idea plays out as a republican quest: this is the last rebellion…. This is the greatest force ever assembled…. The Kingdom of Heaven has been known by that name since the Authority first set himself above the rest of the angels. And we want no part of it. This world is different. We intend to be free citizens in the Republic of Heaven. Anatole France’s angelic rebels against God pursue a simil…
Read More…“threaten freedom of speech and faith.” Nigeria: U.S. based anti-gay group promotes anti-gay propaganda amid increasing official hostility The Mail & Guardian follows up on the July arrest of 52 men at a party in the state of Kano on suspicion of homosexuality. The men were arrested by the Hisbah Corps, an Islamic security force established by the Kano state government in 2003 to enforce Sharia, Islamic religious law. Speaking to the Mail & Guardi…
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