Religion Dispatches
…ed in mainstream America today. Just compare King’s bold speech before the Lincoln Memorial in the early 1960s, to Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s religious rhetoric in 2010… There were progressive and aesthetically sophisticated Catholics in the U.S., and James Sweeney identified himself as one. These were the men and women who created the culture in which the Second Vatican Council made sense. Sweeney was profligate in his reading, and daring in…
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…ates, Talento declares that women control access to sex. If they “value it cheaply”—meaning, sex outside of marriage—no man would ever want to marry them, because he wouldn’t have to. In this view, men marry for sex, while women marry for economic security—a deeply depressing glimpse into the gender and marriage politics this movement seeks to impose on the rest of the nation. Have more children, but have them my way—A rift in the pronatalist-coal…
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…to your place of work and deliver a public address. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? The Trump train is rolling into Colorado this Friday (yes, my 55th birthday), and the first stop is my campus–the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. You, dear reader, will know the flagship campus of the system, CU Boulder, but likely not CU’s fledgling but rapidly growing outpost here in the buckle of the Rocky Mountain Bible Belt. Natur…
Read More…n August 1963, delivering the “’I Have a Dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.” This event would have been like that one, Trump averred, if only the masses of bikers had been allowed to enter the mall area: “I thought this would be like Dr. Martin Luther King where people were lined up from here all the way to the Washington Monument,” he said. “But unfortunately they aren’t allowed to come in.” One Trump organizer at the rally unfur…
Read More…nks to Beck’s “Founders’ Fridays,” “university,” and upcoming rally at the Lincoln Memorial, Barton’s audience is expanding. Barton accuses historians of hiding the truth about slavery and racism from the American people, a charge that fits the larger conspiracy-oriented worldview of Beck and other leading conservatives. In one notable example, first published on Barton’s Wallbuilders’ Web site in 2001, Barton argues in favor of the three-fifths r…
Read More…ent, and maybe it matters to you. McCain has noted several times that the “number one issue… that people should [use to] make a selection of the president of the United States [is] will this person carry on in the Judeo-Christian principle that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?” A person’s faith is, according to McCain, an “important part of our qualifications to lead.” Bracketing his dubious grasp of constitu…
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…nterestingly enough, we are also celebrating the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, who presided over an even more torn-apart nation, and who ended that other peculiar institution of ours, one even more divisive than our present battles over religion and science. Fundamentalist Fervor According to Ron Numbers, in his book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America didn’t rea…
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…ument,” Smith wrote, while “Freedom Conservatives are as likely to look to Lincoln as to the founders, and they may admit to having ancestors who voted for Franklin Roosevelt and marched for civil rights.” Part of the reason liberty has so much appeal is it hasn’t been tainted by the political battles of the 20th century. “Liberty is so rarely used in contemporary political discourse that it’s a word one side can step in and claim for themselves,”…
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…communications were recorded in French, and messages arrived from Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte, John Brown, Montesquieu, Robert E. Lee, Confucius, Robespierre, George Washington, Jesus and Toussaint Louverture. And that’s an abbreviated list. While the Cercle Harmonique itself was small, they occupy a unique historical space. Their séance table was an intersection of southern religion, Catholicism, the Atlantic world, black politics and al…
Read More…they have their own brilliant plan to rally the faithful, glee shouldn’t be part of their vocabulary or their talking points. In any case, I won’t be at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow. It’s my sister’s 50th birthday, and I’d be crazy to miss it….
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