Religion Dispatches
…stitution meant,” she continued. “The homosexuals get it — it’s a struggle between our religious freedoms and their right to do what they want to do.” Ah, there’s the old canard that always gets trotted out by those on the religious right — it’s gays vs. God! Those filthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for us to call them the filthy sinn…
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…ng a long unlit cigar, and inexplicably accompanied by two armed Sudanese “freedom fighters” in military garb. “The photo was taken,” Jennifer writes, “in the upper Nile. My husband, cool as a cucumber in the 120-degree heat, demonstrates that it is possible to be well-dressed even in the far reaches of Africa.” RD contributor Kathryn Joyce, author of the forthcoming Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Beacon Press, March 2009),…
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…monstrations, and other aggressive activities. So, what’s the relationship between people who actually believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and suicide bombings? The film doesn’t really make those connections, nor could it, because they don’t connect. The broader connections between belief and violence could have (and, I’d say, should have) been made, but it would have taken some much more careful consideration of the topic at hand. What Ma…
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…on. … In the United States, The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 by conservative evangelical theologians, emphasized the necessity to believe in the literal truth of scripture. This helped reify the relationship between the Jews of the present and the Israelites of old. In the view of many in the Christian West, Palestine was understood to be ‘‘empty,’’ and this emptiness should be filled by Jews, the descendants of…
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…, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana became the first governor to sign an “academic freedom” bill into law. Observers on both sides of the issue are now waiting for the first school district in the state to adopt a curriculum based on this new language. Of course, these academic freedom bills, along with the “teach the strengths and weaknesses” wording in Texas are merely a watered-down version of intelligent design—what Judge John E. Jones III, in his rul…
Read More…somebody should take the hide off Peg because the stuff inside is so much better than the varnished surface which blinks in the sunlight of public approval.” That’s not to say Peg was a sweetie underneath. He was an angry man through and through, born into hatred of Hearst inherited from his father, responsible for the “Hearst Style,” a populist tongue of blood and cliché, expressive of the sentiments of working people but emptied of any real pol…
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…, the repetition is easy to explain. They are locked up, they have nothing better to do, and they share only that one joke-book. But what explains the constant number-calling around homosexuality in so many American churches? Why do we rehearse arguments most anyone active in church has already heard dozens of time? Why do we behave like prisoners? I don’t think that long-term veterans of church debates have much hope that undecided people will be…
Read More…tark misogyny of the antiabortion movement with the tagline “Women Deserve Better” (than abortion). Feminists for Life has been an early promoter of the increasingly popular prolife emphasis on the harm abortion does to women, and a champion of “father’s rights” with the help of the disgraced ex-Bush appointee Wade Horn (the former pro-abstinence Assistant Secretary of Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who r…
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…dy for some serious War on Culture…er…culture war. So there’s Christian as code-word for ‘evangelical.’ Like when Republican politicians say it. And there’s Christian meaning Protestant, as opposed to Catholic. And there’s Christian the way a missionary might mean it, (as opposed to heathen?). And there are those “anonymous Christians,” or involuntary Christians…was that Rahner who devised that category? Does anyone outside of seminary or grad sch…
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…une 17, Chris Rodda, a Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), an expert on historical revisionism and a frequent contributor to the blog Talk2Action, discusses the rebroadcast of a segment of an HDNet Dan Rather Reports program titled “Christian Soldiers,” (originally aired on October 2, 2007), which features Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF and Stephen Mansfield. “When his last book, Ten Tortu…
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