Religion Dispatches
…to eighty percent of all Americans believe in God, an extraordinarily high number compared with other industrialized nations. But what are the characteristics of this God? Do all Americans base their beliefs on a literal reading of the Bible? Is it the same God if some Americans use the term in its personal, theistic sense referring to a transcendent God in heaven and some use it to refer to a pantheistic, immanent power that infuses all of nature…
Read More…ght Hammond is the latter sort of man. Hammond, 49, and his father, Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., 76, were indicted on federal arson charges after a fire they set spread to land held in trust for the American people by the Bureau of Land Management. Arson on federal land carries a mandatory minimum 5-year sentence under the 1996 federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The Hammonds were remanded to federal prison in 2016. Their incarc…
Read More…es Weinstein can find Jesus at the May 1 May Day event taking place at the Lincoln Memorial, which purports to seek repentance for the nation’s wicked ways. May Day, “a cry to God from a nation in distress,” is organized by D. James Kennedy protege and talk radio host Janet Porter Folger, who apparently is unaware of the day’s, er, socialist history. It is co-hosted by a wide range of religious right figures including Klingenschmitt, Focus on the…
Read MoreRhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee signed marriage equality into law Thursday evening in a celebratory ceremony on the steps of the state capitol. While activists were celebrating the tenth state to embrace marriage equality, Rhode Island’s Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin released a “pastoral” letter that was anything but. Tobin starts his letter by insulting pro-equality Christians. He invites Catholics into prayer and reflection about “thi…
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…ian triumphalism, from Roger Williams in the early 17th century to Abraham Lincoln, who tartly referred to the United States as the “almost chosen” nation. In addressing contemporary matters like our current immigration wars and the State of Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians, Coogan laments how the many biblical teachings mandating extra care and protection for the most vulnerable—especially for immigrants and refugees—have been honore…
Read More…say the opening prayer at an inaugural event on Sunday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This is not only a brilliant political move but I believe a reflection of Barack Obama’s deepest conviction that we are all interdependent and interrelated. Some argue that it was only after feeling the heat from the left that Obama’s team decided to offer the invitation. But in a recent New York Times article Bishop Robinson said he believed the invitatio…
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…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…
Read More…slim and non-Muslim civilizations have by exploring cultural exchange. The Lincoln Center Festival in 2002 (NYT 1 and 2) and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2002, in collaboration with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Silk Road Project, are two notable events that happened very soon after 2001. More recently, there has been a resurgence, at least in New York, of festivals consciously showcasing the Muslim-majority world. In 2007, A Myst…
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…e Byron White’s statement that “The flag is itself a monument [akin to the Lincoln Memorial], subject to similar protection.” I’m likewise baffled by the citizen quoted in a Time magazine article from 1970, quoted in turn by Gardella, who said, “I see the flag as I see God: a supreme being,” and the perhaps even odder statement, from the same source, by evangelist Billy Graham, that the Stars and Stripes is “our Queen.” But what all those quotes s…
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…l crisis. As you’ve probably sussed out by now, that candidate was Abraham Lincoln, whose Republican party was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin1 on the basis of radical opposition to slavery. The original Grand Old Party was—believe it or not—the Religious Left of their day, built on the backbone of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists (such as the church I’m going to visit), who sent their culture west from New England to make sure no mor…
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