Religion Dispatches
…ary, “uses the IMDb, the wildly popular Internet Movie Database, to select today’s most influential contemporary films. Into the Dark dissects the theology of everyday life, exploring the work of the Spirit of God in creation and redemption to discuss “general revelation” through cinema and sometimes unlikely filmmakers.” John Whitehead, the President and Founder of the Charlottesville, VA-based The Rutherford Institute, has a new book titled The…
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…eer Mormons more closely resembled Indians than other contemporary Anglos. Today, a residue of this mentality persists among “ethnic Mormons” in Utah. However, the homeland ethos faded dramatically in the twentieth century. The LDS Church has not actively encouraged Zionism in many, many decades. Since the 1960s, with the advent of the modern missionary program, the church has set its sights beyond the rim of the Great Basin. It wants to become a…
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…Franciscan, Serra, who already had years of mission experience in Mexico’s Sierra Gorda, experience that included a fair amount of zealous evangelizing and inquisitorial spirit. As someone who practiced significant self-flagellation and focused much on the salvific power of his own physical suffering, it is perhaps unsurprising that Serra also championed corporal punishment as part of evangelizing native converts living in the missions. While a re…
Read More…hould be impeached because he is a Muslim (complete with a promo promising free guns, paid for by “a millionaire” who wants you “protected against what’s coming.”) The video in the email is by evangelist Jack van Impe, known for his premillennial rapture theology and his disconnected rambling in Bible verses. It is entitled “President Obama’s Religion in Question” and argues that he is really a Muslim. Joan, who claims in an email to be “well-educ…
Read More…view LGBT people—as purely sexual beings. Foster’s screed is simply a long promo for a new ex-gay movie coming out, and the trailer, three-minutes of nauseating footage, centers around how each of these former homosexuals lived their lives in clubs, engaging in cheap, easy, and often public sex, or were sexually abused. For all the claptrap the religious right yells about how they don’t want to think of us “that way,” the trailer for the film is p…
Read More…nial past and our colonial governance by the Roman Catholic Church. We are free at last to live and love as we were born to be. For freedom –– not happiness –– is the precious stone. One cannot cling to happiness; it submits to no clinging. To be free, to live and love in your homeland, this is the most precious stone against which all others fade by comparison. We now know that, whatever organised religion may say, our way of loving is right. No…
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…example, some of the achievements of our last “liberal” administration: a “free trade” pact deeply opposed by working people; the partial privatization of welfare; and the passage of a “religious freedom” act that allows conservative evangelicals to influence foreign policy according to their analysis of other faiths’ religious customs. Each of these projects had been long dreamed of by the avant-garde of American fundamentalism. That’s not to say…
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…ndated that “In God We Trust” appear on U.S. currency. Neither required by free exercise, nor prohibited by establishment In the suit brought by the Freedom from Religion Foundation and several of its leaders, Judge Crabb ruled that the housing allowance exemption violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion. Crabb had reached an identical conclusion at an earlier stage of the litigation, in 2013, but she was ov…
Read More…ommonwealth both in terms of the ownership of the asset and in terms of the common good of widespread open access. Sometimes free isn’t really free….
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…th’s damage may actually leave some plaintiffs better able to defend their free-exercise rights than before. And other rulings on both free-exercise and non-establishment cases—such as in employment cases involving churches and cases involving government-sanctioned prayer—have maintained a distinctiveness for religion as a constitutional category. But other learned First Amendment scholars—such as Marci Hamilton of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law…
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