Religion Dispatches
…kids are getting too many days off. More atheist billboards, this time in Florida. Denver Broncos rookie Tim Tebow has added a tonsure haircut to his mix of evangelical Christianity and football. The new do has drawn comparisons between the former Florida Gator star and Saint Francis of Assisi. Then there’s the question of why the usual scripture citation on Tebow’s eye-black didn’t make in onto the cover of the latest NCAA football video game. P…
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…population, but are overrepresented in some sought-after swing states like Florida, Ohio, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Memories of hanging chads and an election decided by 537 votes have prompted a frenzy of Yiddish: from the Republican Jewish Coalition’s “Oy” billboards in Florida to the pro-Obama “Call Your Zeyde” video released this week. The historian Jonathan Sarna has chronicled the trajectory of the Jewish vote since Reconstruction and notes a…
Read More…ocratic (New York, California, Illinois). Among the big swing states, only Florida supposedly has a crucial Jewish vote. Yet it turns out to be only about 5%. Surely the Catholic vote even in Florida is bigger than that. Why do McCain and his campaign strategists think that they can risk offending Catholics more than they can risk offending Jews? What does that tell us about their assessment of the political landscape? Perhaps internal polling sho…
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…ing about it. (Please read Robert Jones’ skewering of one such proposal in Florida which makes it illegal for public schools to cause “discomfort” to white men.) We’ve seen the revival of the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” proposals, also in Florida. In Tennessee, Pulitzer-prize winning Holocaust novel Maus has been banned, quite a story to break on Holocaust Remembrance Day. These bills are awful and rightly vilified for their anti-equality, anti-real…
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…oting in 2012 to the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018, to name two of the most high profile. These latest AR-15-themed antics by elected Republicans also highlight one of the few things the modern GOP stands for: performative cruelty. Anything to “trigger the libs” will do, including re-traumatizing the victims of school shootings. Remember Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Stoneman Douglas survivor David Hogg (…
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…in public schools and other public buildings, have been signed into law in Florida, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee so far in 2018. Similar bills were enacted in past years in Colorado, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Virginia.* At the teleconference to launch Project Blitz on February 16, 2016, David Barton, explained to state legislators that the IGWT bills and the bills in Category 1 are, “kinda like whack-a-mole for the other side. It’ll drive t…
Read More…and hip hop beats shocked listeners of a local Christian radio station in Florida. Elsewhere in Florida, a thief robbed a church, felt guilty, returned the stolen electronics, and joined the church. Some Christian pastors are trying to bring more humor to the pulpit. In New York, a Department of Transportation supervisor talked a man down from jumping off a bridge by reminding the jumper of his Christian faith. A former pastor in Indiana is going…
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…the horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. (Not coincidentally, this Christian nationalist state law comes right out of the Project Blitz playbook.) One of the main issues we fixated on in my evangelical childhood, right up there with abortion and gay people existing, was prayer in school, and how “awful” it was that “activist judges” had “banned prayer” in public schools. (We generally didn’t mention that,…
Read More…ong after, the former acquaintance called to threaten Subhi from a Turkish phone number. Power noted that Subhi spoke at a recent UN Security Council Session, the first-ever dedicated to LGBT rights, which she said was an important precedent to set: But also, it allowed us to convey, in a single voice, and with the authority of the Security Council – which is the premiere global enforcement body for peace and security – it allowed us to convey tha…
Read More…nts than their quota allows. Most Muslim countries have a quota; a limited number of hajjis permitted from that country in any one year. This number is set by hajj authorities in Saudi Arabia, because, in all fairness, there has to be a cap on how many Muslims converge on the place. Right now, it stands at around 3 million! Countries with large populations of Muslims have many more applicants than their allotted number of pilgrims. This means you…
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