Religion Dispatches
…ds of American jobs—up to an estimated 127,000. That’s Muslim money buying American goods, creating American jobs. That’s us benefiting from growth in the Gulf and Southeast Asia. That’s the world growing together. The Muslim world’s democratic convulsions—Indonesia preceded the Arab world by roundabout a decade—are responses to economic lethargy, with booming populations ravenous for rights, dignity, and prosperity. In short, thank the world’s la…
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…ponse point to the funding source as evidence of its exclusive nature: the American Family Association. The AFA’s Bryan Fischer has said that Native Americans were “morally disqualified” from holding their lands because of savagery and immorality; that gays in the Nazi military were responsible for “six million dead Jews”; that the First Amendment only applies to Christians (which is his basis for preaching that Muslims do not have the right to bu…
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…ned with authentic caring.” Examples include Whole Foods Market, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and, somewhat mysteriously, Amazon.com, which is known for using underpaid temp-style labor in its warehouses and allegedly mistreating employees at its home offices. You don’t have to be a Marxist to question whether these institutions are “fulfilling every major value of the great spiritual traditions.” At the very least, that sentiment might seem ali…
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…e—ours. Both the supernormal and the paranormal were later picked up by an American writer of glorious talent and wicked humor named Charles Fort. Charles sat in the New York Public Library every day for decades, reading pretty much every periodical in French and English back to 1800 as he looked for reports of “super-constructions in the sky” (what we would now call UFOs) and paranormal people. He found plenty of both. In works like The Book of t…
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…unding the National Conservative movement is not without precedent. Between 1800 and 1950, Europe endured what amounted to a second Catholic Counter-Reformation. In the latter portion of the 19th century, predominantly Catholic countries in Europe—which of course European nations have largely been since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia—experienced an upsurge of royalist and irredentist passions to which the Catholic Church often attached itself (for e…
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…rine Band playing some of the same “airs” it played for Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Compared to royal coronations, American inaugurations are remarkably simple affairs. But our ceremonies retain their own majesty and are capable of projecting a strong sense that something sacred is happening. Our inaugurations have always reflected a mashup of civil religion—invocations of our secular sacred texts, appeals to mystic chords of national memory—and bit…
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…ith basic union rights. It is unfortunate, in this context, that the latest 1800-word “let’s fix it” bill to come from House Democrats is called the HEROES Act, when in fact what their bill precisely does not do is maintain employment lifelines for first responders and others, whereas what it does do is heavily subsidize the private health insurance industry. “Nothing will ever be the same”: In all likelihood a whole lot will be the same, only wor…
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…st pride march since violence disrupted event a decade ago On July 8, about 1800 people took part in the first gay pride march in the capital city of Tallinn in a decade. In 2007, AFP reports, the march “descended into chaos” when “participants were attacked with stones and beaten by opponents.” Czech Republic: ‘We are fair’ campaign hopes to spark debate on marriage equality Earlier this month, activists in the Coalition for Marriage (KZM) launch…
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…own descendants make. If those descendants exist. But for many native-born Americans there are fewer of them—fewer children and, as birthrates drop and marrying age rises, still-fewer grandchildren or none at all. This, in turn, says Douthat, has created a sense of alienation that is only further fueled by the decline of working-class communities and gives rise to “a grim vision of the future, in which after you’ve passed, your few kids and grandk…
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…ing, the 2016 election has highlighted the enormous diversity of ways that Americans perceive honesty. But the territory of lying has always been contested. Even when the truth is clear-cut, certain questions remain slippery: what exactly does it mean to lie? When is it okay to lie? And what are the social, moral, and spiritual consequences of deception? To understand these issues better, I called up a historian of lying. Dallas Denery II is the a…
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