Religion Dispatches
…was crucial as many of its leaders are African Americans who reside in the New Orleans East neighborhood where the Vietnamese community is found. New Orleans East is a historically and predominantly African-American region—the largest in the city—so the prospects of cooperation between the two communities was vital. “Both communities have been willing to be in a relationship; it’s just that [the] process has needed assistance, and that was vision…
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…re doing extensively, in nationwide church appearances and through Gayle’s promotion of her new book. Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made In My Darkest Hour (Tyndale House, 2010) chronicles her and her family’s years in exile and urges women to follow her in choosing a path of forgiveness and love towards their flawed husbands. Why I Stayed paints a compelling picture of an eternal evangelical women’s leader continuing to demonstrate the path of virt…
Read More…sion to pump up his own media profile in advance of the publication of his new book? Jeffress’ Twilight’s Last Gleaming (featuring a one-page foreword by Mike Huckabee) is due out in January. It predicts the end-times demise of the United States but counsels Christians on how they can make “America’s last days your best days” by being the “light” and “salt” of the world. Advance publicity for the book describes Jeffress as a media personality, lis…
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…wer format, as if he was of sufficient importance to be interviewed by the news media, Tarrant’s manifesto winds through a rambling set of comments and memes expressing Islamophobia, hatred of immigrants, and a strident right-wing nationalism. Impervious to irony, the Australian Tarrant—himself a foreigner in New Zealand—demands that outsiders be forcibly removed. He shows admiration for the nationalist stance of President Trump and, like Breivik,…
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…vies shape how people, especially children, view the world. In the case of New Orleans and the myriad of cultures it holds, to stint on all of the facets that make New Orleans and Louisiana the wonderful, complex, and sometimes exasperating place that it is is a crime. Disney’s princesses, once again, may have big beautiful eyes, but while kids are enjoying the view, Disney’s hack job of deconstructing history by making it “cute” is just as destru…
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…er the last twenty years has been marked by decline and retrenchment, this new data indicates that one trait of the new public face of religion is what we might call a generous rootedness in tradition. And if these roots—as the Pew data suggest—do not hinder but actually strengthen Americans’ abilities to reach across religious borders to work together for the common good, these findings mark indeed a promising way forward for a country as religio…
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…Racial World Brian Bantum Fortress Press November 2016 I wanted to tell a new story, a theological story that could help people begin to understand how some of the complexities of race and gender are theological problems that are connected to fundamental questions of how God created us and how we account for what seems so broken in the world. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? The most important take-home message is that our…
Read More…ss, tell remarkably similar stories of Israeli soldier-assassins who start new lives in New York. By normalizing the image of soldiers and patriots leaving Israel, The Zohan and Restless (like Steven Spielberg’s weightier Munich [2005] both normalize the difficult questions of post-Zionism. Restless, directed by Amos Kollek (son of the longtime mayor of Jerusalem), depicts the reunion of Moshe, a down-and-out Israeli poet in New York, and Tzach, t…
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…s Fraser, a philosophy professor at Oxford, complained on Twitter that the New College of the Humanities was a “new atheist school.” The Church Mouse, a popular Christian blogger, suspects that it will shut out religious students and faculty: It seems difficult to imagine how they would consider the CV of a religious professor seriously when looking to fill teaching roles. And how would they respond to a student candidate in an interview who profe…
Read More…d cause riots on the streets in big cities across America. According to OneNewsNow, the online news service of Donald Wildmons’ American Family Association, Corbin “contends there is potential for public riots the night of or after the election, if Obama’s lead in the polls does not translate into victory.” “I don’t think that’s something that we’ve looked at very closely, and I think that this could be a powder keg here as we get towards that day…
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