Religion Dispatches
…kers is the worst possible remedy. But this doesn’t mean that many middle-class and working-class Americans, including many who consider themselves free of any residual Puritanism, don’t buy into the new austerity. Obama’s response so far to Romney’s Austerity/Prosperity Gospel: “Do the math.” The professor’s answer to the preacher. But Mr. President, with respect: Your own Education Department will affirm my suggestion that we are no longer the…
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…gence apps” including As One America, which contains the name, address and phone number of Christian neighbors “who are not showing up to vote or who are not registered.” He then showed a map with big red arrows pointing to precincts “within striking distance” from Vida Church to the precincts that are “where the devil’s got a stronghold that God wants to break up.” The app was developed by Superfeed Technologies, which has also designed apps for…
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…money.” A woman raises her hand and stands up as someone brings her a microphone. “My husband and I removed the Gideon Bible from our bedside table. We placed it in the hall and we urge everyone here to do the same,” she says. People nod and a few applaud. So far, I know this much about atheists: they don’t keep, they mark out, and they remove. “Religion is Weak” David Silverman, the flashy young president, welcomes us to the 37th annual America…
Read More…m his home in East Helena, Montana, to a predominantly Mormon community in Las Vegas, Nevada, so that he could be surrounded by LDS people. He served in the Church, attended LDS temple services, worked for a Church-owned bookstore, got engaged to a woman, and prayed earnestly that he’d feel the same kind of attraction to her as he did to men. “But one day in the temple,” Cox says, “I got the impression I was asking for the wrong thing: that I shou…
Read More…e often caricatured as a “red bishop” who preached a communist message of class struggle that supported the armed Zapatistas, Bishop Ruiz consistently espoused a vision of nonviolence and peaceful mediation. In 1999 he founded the Father Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Centre and his life as a whole reminds us that the Latin American Church has been and still is the Church of the Poor. Bishops Ruiz’s death marks the passing of yet another prie…
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…earing T-shirts with a verse from Psalm 95 on their backs—En su mano están las profundidades de la tierra; suyas son las alturas de los montes (In his hand are the depths of the Earth and the mountain peaks belong to him)—the miners’ bodies themselves enacted a liturgy of grace and thanksgiving that gathered millions throughout the day to live feeds from the mine shaft to computers, laptops, and smartphones around the world. Millions, likewise, pa…
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…as,” the United Church of Bacon (UCB) placed a holiday themed billboard in Las Vegas, Nevada featuring two strips of bacon hiteheadearing a Santa hat and a Star of David respectively. This billboard’s slogan reads “Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from the 13,000 Atheists and Skeptics at the United Church of Bacon,” replete with the tagline, “Bacon is our God because bacon is real.” Since its inception during a meeting at Penn Jillette’s house i…
Read More…t lane. [ZOA president Mort] Klein gave Adelson a gift mezuzah for his new Las Vegas home (in which “God himself would be happy to live if he could afford it”] then Miriam Adelson told the audience “how I fell in love” with Hagee “the most effective Christian Zionist in the world” and then Hagee described the Adelsons as “the greatest citizens of America.” And the crowd kvelled. The extravagant accolades did not end there. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), wh…
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
Read More…borhoods. The turnaround was so astounding that one year, the best sign at Atlanta’s gay pride read: “We can rehab marriage and sell it back to you at twice the price.” Seems that sign was a bit prescient. As more and more states accept same-sex marriage, researchers are showing that gays and lesbians have much to teach their straight counterparts about the institution they have been bogarting for the last few centuries. As Liz Mundy recalls in he…
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