Religion Dispatches
…us just keeps saying gutsy things—like when he told a roomful of people, one of whom was Governor Haley Barbour: Few politicians today use outright race baiting, but we see the symbols some use and the phrases they utter and everyone knows what the code is—what really is being said. Oh, and he’s also called attention to how voter ID laws endanger the voting rights of poor and elderly people, and was named a Champion of Justice by the Mississippi C…
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…ly imagine the weariness induced by the attempt to constantly acclimate to new hardware as well as new software. What do touchscreens have to do with encyclicals? This would have been an absurd question just ten years ago. But for today’s wired believers, if you don’t have a digital device, you probably won’t even read those encyclicals. Paper is so yesterday. The Pope’s 2011 observations about the dangers of social media are fairly astute, even i…
Read More…efs; and is a non-profit organization as described in the Internal Revenue Code. Religious organizations protested that this four-pronged test would only exempt houses of worship, but not, say, a church that served people of different faiths through a soup kitchen. Under the new proposed rule (which is still subject to a public comment period), an employer seeking an exemption would only have to meet the forth prong of the test, thus widely expand…
Read More…ne time managed Bachmann’s failed presidential campaign, weighed in at Fox News: Having worked for Congressman Bachmann’s campaign for president, I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Senator Joe McCarthy level… The Republican Party, which John McCain led as our nominee in 2008, is going to become irrelevant if we become the party of intolerance and hate. The party fo…
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…coming out of the Rutherford Institute (one of the leaders of the right’s new movement to protect ‘religious liberty’), the National Organization for Marriage, Alan Sears, Donald Wildmon, Glenn Beck, or many of the pundits on Fox News. Millennialism, as I’ve written about previously in these pages, is the general term for the belief—religious or secular, but usually religious—that a massive global transformation is imminent, from Christ’s Second…
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…families in concrete ways. He’s talking about a “more family-friendly tax code.” He wants the government to pay people to procreate. It’s a “big government” Republicans can get behind—a “baby government.” Though women of childbearing age are the people Douthat wants to get busy getting pregnant, he doesn’t talk about women very much—or the social, physical, and financial costs women still pay for having kids. Douthat blames women without talking…
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…n. They went 78 percent for Romney, up from 74 percent for McCain. The bad news for the Republicans is that, according to Pew, the evangelical share of the population continues to erode—from 21 percent in 2007 to 19 percent in 2012—while the number of the religiously unaffiliated is rising—from 16 percent to 20 percent over the same period. In other words, “nones” and evangelicals are equivalent in numbers. One explanation for this change in Ameri…
Read More…, could he possibly come out in favor of arresting women for praying? Or even, with a straight face, say it was a matter of local concern that he wasn’t going to comment on, when he otherwise has (albeit in a perfunctory way) called for the promotion of women’s rights in other parts of the Middle East? And since Obama was promoting the rights and freedom of religious minorities last night, wouldn’t this case fall under his concern? There are good…
Read More…o take but two bellwether issues. If the swing voters in the swing states knew about these stances, they’d be less likely to vote for Romney, even though he won the first debate in convincing, alpha-dog style. So it’s obviously in Romney’s interest to leave that stuff for the base and hush it up when it comes to winning over the middle. But that partisan preference doesn’t explain why the president never mentioned social or religious issues, and w…
Read More…the day in 1954 when the “Johnson amendment” language was put into the tax code was the day that “changed America” and set the stage for bad Supreme Court decisions and everything else that has gone wrong since the 1960s. Pulpit Freedom Sunday participants agree to preach political sermons, send them to the IRS, and dare the agency to sue them. The Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund) has offered legal help to c…
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