Religion Dispatches
…coming, but the secularists.” For that, he received a standing ovation, and Parsley called him a “modern-day prophet.” In an interview, Miller told me that he was a “great admirer” of Parsley, and that he became aware of him while campaiging for George W. Bush in Ohio in 2004. Parsley was a “giant” coming along in the evangelical world, Miller added, and “without any question, he can reach the same status, he’s right up there among them,” referri…
Read More…hose Catholics somewhere along the line if he hopes to win the GOP nomination, especially in the later part of the primary calendar as attention turns to Catholic-heavy Northeastern and Midwestern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio. Then Trump may learn it’s one thing to demagogue a religious minority like Muslims that’s unpopular in some quarters, and another thing all together to suggest something unsavory about…
Read More…th helping George W. Bush win the 2004 election, by getting voters out for Ohio’s gay marriage ban — voters who presumably pulled the lever for Bush in big numbers. (Although we haven’t heard much politicking from Parsley lately, one of his big cheerleaders at the time was the now seemingly omnipresent Bishop Harry Jackson.) Parsley appeared to Republicans to be a big enough draw that John McCain sought his support during the 2008 presidential cam…
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…vernor John Sanchez, and others. Upcoming events will be held in Colorado, Ohio, Nevada, Maine, Maryland, and Washington, with a wind-up event in Virginia. Manaigo says the campaign’s goal is “to pull together multi-ethnic, multi-denominational groups to swing the difference in some of these elections, be they local, statewide, and certainly we have our eyes fixed in due purpose on the national campaign.” (Friendly suggestion for Manaigo: If he h…
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…rong of a thoroughgoing administrative crackdown, Cedarville University in Ohio, for example, forced out a tenured female Bible professor. The new female religion instructor is only permitted to teach women. One notable exception to the institutionalization of Christian patriarchy is evangelicalism’s flagship magazine, Christianity Today. Its women’s blog has a number of writers with diverse perspectives on women’s roles and many other issues. Rid…
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…omote a visit he’s making to the economically hard-hit town of Wilmington, Ohio. He has said, inaccurately, that the town has taken no government money and that its residents’ economic plan is based on praying to God to provide. In that sense, he argues, Wilmington is trying to mimic Bedford Falls, the fictional town where It’s a Wonderful Life is set, as opposed to the movie’s fictional slum of Pottersville. Although the film is not devoid of rel…
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…id 1980s, when my friend was watching his friends die, I was in college in Ohio. The school where I did my undergraduate work was a little bubble of progressive political consciousness—and contentiousness—in the solidly conservative suburbs on the west side of Cleveland. I have a vivid memory of sitting in a TV lounge in the student union and feeling shocked rage when a local newscaster led a story about a kid who had gotten HIV through a blood tr…
Read More…ng to prevent any gay marriages from being performed on military bases. An Ohio Bishop put a stop to parishes and schools in his dioceses supporting the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation because the foundation might someday support stem-cell research. American Sikhs continue to be mistaken for terrorists and attacked. The New York Times profiles the International House of Prayer and its recent growth into a full blown religious movement. The…
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…erial prosperity to all believers who have enough faith,” with even higher numbers of Pentecostals and charismatic Christians agreeing with that statement. Go to any Word of Faith church, tune in to TBN, or read reams of books written by Word of Faith evangelists, and you will find the movement’s trademark selective literalism of both the Old and New Testaments, picking out verses that seem—regardless of hermeneutics demonstrating otherwise—to rei…
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…ecome obvious. Less than a month after Dobbs, a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio had to leave the state to seek an abortion. That story, along with many others, convinced some conservatives to recalibrate their message, even if that meant downplaying or—in the case of senate candidate Blake Masters—denying their anti-abortion stance. A peculiar assortment of anti-abortion pundits has stepped into this morass. Unlike my classmates, these more sophis…
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