Religion Dispatches
…itical appointee and current Senior Fellow at an evangelical think tank focused on religious freedom. RD readers will be familiar with the Frank Gaffney vs. Suhail Khan battle, which I reported on in January. (UPDATE: I’ve uploaded a copy of the ugly flyer Hughes was passing out.) As I discuss in the piece, there was one official and explicitly Islamophobic panel at the conference, the essential premise of which was that shari’ah law is coming to…
Read More…l 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 Center for Justice. Yep. Classic Dick Molpus. May his tribe i…
Read More…rb anyone’s “religious freedom.” What our community is fighting for is our freedom to not be abused in the name of religion and to not have our freedoms curtailed or denied in the name of religion. The ultimate goal of gay and lesbian people, in my opinion, is to call us all to a “superior lifestyle” — a lifestyle that recognizes the inherent worth and humanity of every human being, whether we agree with them, or like their choice of life partner,…
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…nt missions and street outreaches of the urban counterculture—Ted and Elizabeth Wise’s Living Room coffeehouse in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Arthur Blessitt’s His Place coffeehouse on the Sunset Strip, in Hollywood—into suburban America. The Jesus movement entered the national consciousness in 1971, when Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell opened Broadway and off-Broadway, respectively, and a pink-skinned, purple-haired Jesus in…
Read More…oping a line of legal reasoning that the future lawyers in her class might use, she wove her way to two Supreme Court cases in the 1960s, in both of which the court ruled that prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. A student questioned the relevance of the 1777 event to the court rulings, because in 1777 the country did not yet have a Constitution. “And what did we have at that time?” Dunbar asked. Answer: “The Declaration of Independence….
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…of the social justice movements (especially around worker justice issues) used Yiddish as an organizing language but spoke “American.” The conceptual vocabulary of the union movement and the socialist movement was embraced by the Jewish participants in those movements; and continued to be used when those Jews started their own organizations, such as the American Jewish Congress. During the seventies (which was, for all intents and purposes, when…
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…ways, some more sophisticated than others. While some advocates of Zionism used it to imply that Palestine was empty of people, that suggestion was contradicted by the reports of many Western visitors. The phrase was most pointedly used to claim that the Arabs of Palestine had no distinct Palestinian identity. They were ‘‘Arabs,’’ not a cohesive national group. That Palestine was not ‘‘empty’’ (in either the demographic or political sense) soon be…
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…American religious life when an Orthodox Jew can say such a thing, it also betrays a stunning naiveté. The evangelists Cohen seems to enjoy so much, though they might fetishize a Jew, presumably would not reciprocate; Jesus, after all, being the only way to the father. And he has strangely fond words for John Hagee, joining the ranks of shortsighted Jews who refuse to see the profound crackpot anti-Semitism lurking beneath the Texas pastor’s suppo…
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…h century, silent film actress Theda Bara became the archetypal “vamp” who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a pre-Code romp called The Devil’s Bondwoman (1916), portrayed a woman whose sexual appetites were so insatiable that she attracted Satan himself. By the 1940s, a comic book entitled Madame Satan [see image left] told a similar story to adolescents of a seductive woman who, using Satan’s supernatural power, att…
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…icissitudes. If only. At its hip-swinging height, love permeates, pressing between gritted teeth and crow’s feet, between the tedium of a day and the discontents of whatever profession. Etta may be right that it’s the thrill you rest your cheek to, and St. Paul may have it when he says it endures all things. But these Weddings don’t live on love; they live on calculation. One of the wicked pleasures as a reader of the announcements is to fantasize…
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