Religion Dispatches
…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …
Read More…es ECI’s leadership – knows this to be the case. Which makes ECI’s video a cheap lie — yet another in a long litany of desperate efforts by the far right to convert the largely liberal American Jewish community to neo-conservatism, hawkish policies on Israel, and the belief that “Barack Hussein Obama” is a Muslim. That said, there actually are two interesting forms of antisemitism going on here. First is the antisemitism of ECI itself. To tug at…
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…why any leader who claimed to be a Christian would say that the nation of Haiti has been cursed ever since it “swore a pact to the Devil.” In my book Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church: Eyewitness Accounts of How American Churches are Hijacking Jesus, Bagging the Beatitudes, and Worshipping the Almighty Dollar , I cited how the words of the Greatest Commandment have been repeated ad nauseam to the point where the radical message of Christ ha…
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…dou.* In other words, we needn’t see Christianity as incompatible with any number of practices or beliefs associated with other religions or cultures. Examples of Christian popular magic are plentiful. The local practitioners of magic of early modern England known as “cunning-folk” identified as Christian, as did those who used their magical services. Historian of European magic Owen Davies provides an example of a popular Christian magical charm…
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…adaptive and individualistic and growing so fast, much in the same way the number of “spiritual but not religious” people is growing. Yes, and the exact same thing is paralleled in Scientology. You have a church that is obsessed with maintaining an absolute iron grip over the religion. If you don’t follow Scientology under the church’s guidance, you’re not really a Scientologist. And that again has led to stagnation, it’s led to a massive drop in…
Read More…lishments, beginning with their work in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and the founding of “Rescue Haiti’s Children.” Vision Forum brought medical aid, clothing, supplies and shelter to those in need. The remaining nine “lessons,” though, are solidly rooted in Christian Reconstructionist dominionism and Biblical Patriarchy. Promoting a multi-generational understanding of history as the unfolding of God’s plan (a vision of history rooted…
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…Green’s film pays homage to this tradition by setting the opening scene in Haiti just before the 2010 earthquake. (However, instead of portraying Haiti as a home base from which demons are unleashed on the West, the family receives a Vodou blessing that may have bestowed some supernatural protection.) For those who subscribed to the Western “myth of disenchantment,” belief in the supernatural took precedence over denominational differences. Blatty…
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…ligious leaders didn’t know better. Remember? How Pat Robertson blamed the Haitian earthquake on an 18th century pact with the devil? Or when Sephardic Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Ovadia Yosef blamed Israel’s latest bout of wildfires on secular Israelis not keeping the Sabbath? Or how about the time some Christian fundamentalists said that he 2005 tsunami in Indonesia was punishment for, in the words of one, “worldliness, materialism, hedonism, uncleanne…
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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…
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…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…
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