Religion Dispatches
…movement, with concerns about the objectivity of the media as well as the best way to solve the problems. Rather, many evangelicals are concerned that proposed solutions to global warming would actually hurt the poor.” Still, millions of Christians—no matter how you slice it, Catholic or Protestant, evangelical or not—want to see their faith community become more active in environmental stewardship. There is a void in Christian leadership on envi…
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…e of law, and minority rights in their societies. When the U.S. government bestows high-level diplomatic attention instead on select (typically male, adult, and non-democratically appointed) spokespersons, it aids them in consolidating their own power and authority within their communities. The Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group does not ignore this potential for discrimination. It writes of the importance of partnering with “women religiou…
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…going to be your friend based on how you feel on a particular issue. My best friend—he’s a liberal Democrat, and I’m a conservative Republican. And we’re friends, to this day, from high school. Even though we hold completely opposite views on many issues, we’re friends, because we know that our friendship isn’t based upon a mutual understanding or agreement on political issues. And that’s not the way it should be for any friendship. So the peop…
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…n undisclosed, but reportedly astronomical, advance for his sequel to Your Best Life Now. (He did confess having trouble coming up with a title for the sequel to his superlative-laden debut work.) Americans seem to want a God who has a stake in the minutiae of their personal existence. Osteen’s God, for example, is a God of details. He writes in Best Life that God cares about the outcome of our lives and wants us to be happy, successful and blesse…
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…minantly in early Palestinian Aramaic. Indeed, even the name of God in the best-accepted scholarly manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, Codex Leningradensis, is in fact typically written to be read not in Hebrew but in Aramaic: the tetragrammaton (יהוה or YHWH) is predominantly written with the vowels for shma, Aramaic for “the name.” Jewish linguistic practice at the time when the Hebrew Bible’s form was being finalized and the events represented in t…
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…at that’s what people on “my side” do too. To make it worse, even when the best of our leaders assert that “both sides do it and it needs to stop,” our media culture is so divided that most of us couldn’t come up with examples of our own side “doing it.” I find appalling the way that Sarah Palin talks about “re-loading” in the face of criticism and even more so the target map circulated by her PAC that received so much coverage this past weekend d…
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…ces. On the other hand, the attacks of 9/11 have brought forth some of the best this nation has seen. I recall receiving flowers at the office door of our Muslim Student Association at the same time our members reported being spat on. Responding to such bigotry, civic leaders, faith-based coalitions, and academics charged the battle lines of public discourse in the best spirit of humanism to show that Islam, like all other religions, was at its co…
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…ernor Rick Perry, McLeroy insists he is only interested in seeing that the best science education standards are adopted. In no way, he has promised, will he push for the teaching of creationism or intelligent design. But wary educators believe the state board members may be eyeing an innocuous-sounding phrase buried in the curriculum’s general standards. Steve Schafersman of Texas Citizens for Science said that the existing wording “strengths and…
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…p, McMurtry has made mythologizing silly, the filmmakers merely human, and bestowed practical wisdom on the buzzards. What McMurtry most impressed on a teenage me was that an adult understood some coaches are sadists, being young is as befuddling as growing old, and that the most vocally righteous Christians are likely covering something up. My favorite McMurtry book is The Evening Star (1992). Aurora Greenway’s life after death is my brand of tri…
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…st and white Catholics in the Northeast. You can bet that Jones—one of the best pollsters of American religion at work today—has the data to back his argument up. White Christians, as he notes, are much more likely than the average citizen to buy the “heritage not hate” shtick about Confederate monuments, and much less likely to agree that the repercussions of slavery and institutionalized racism make it difficult for Blacks to find economic succe…
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