Religion Dispatches
…latter days history, by staging a Jerusalem rally in which he invokes not Lincoln and King, like he did on the National Mall, but Moses. Beck’s latest venture is sure to draw a variety of Christian Zionists, his own supporters, and assorted end-timers, who all may get more of a show than they bargained for. Beck’s statement, “I’ve been asked to stand in Jerusalem” suggests that he may be conflating his role with that of the two witnesses of Revel…
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…the congregation should vote for him because Republicans were the party of Lincoln. Then he left before the halfway mark to cruise around Detroit with Ben Carson. RD’s Anthea Butler argued in the pages of the Washington Post that Trump was probably getting used by Greater Faith Ministries’ Bishop Wayne T. Jackson and other prosperity gospel preachers just as much as he was using them. Maybe more. Butler started her close with this alarming kicker:…
Read More…was a good conservative when he pioneered ecological sanity as was Abraham Lincoln when he took on slavery and supported state sponsored banks to encourage development, improve infrastructure and public education. Nelson Rockefeller was being a good conservative when he said pregnant women, not government officials, should be in charge of their own pregnancies. But “conservativism” has hit the moral basement and Paul Ryan wants to further debase…
Read More…t pastors is a bit like the rhetorical question of, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” Williams callously brushes aside the possibility of gays and lesbians being sentenced to death to focus on pastors who may be imprisoned for “harboring” gays and lesbians. Then again, Williams, during his tenure in office, has not been known for his overwhelming concern for the lives of gays and lesbians, preferring to bow to pressure from anti-g…
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…except endure sadistic torture. For years, scholars have noted how Abraham Lincoln’s suffering was interpreted as quasi-redemptive in the register of national mythology. Michael Rogin has shown how Reagan and his handlers successfully extended this tradition to key moments in Reagan’s career, such as his near-assassination. From this perspective, the puzzle about McCain’s religion is less what Lofton highlights—his apparent hypocrisy and the paper…
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…in 1846 situated in a stunning valley less than twenty miles from Abraham Lincoln’s birth home and childhood farm. Merton was accepted as a petitioner into the Abbey of Gethsemani in December of that same year. Taking the name of Father Louis, and the requisite Trappist vows of silent obedience, Merton put his astonishing voice and vast artistic powers into print, thereby becoming the most public of hermits and the most prolific writer American C…
Read More…copal Bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, to kick things off at the Lincoln Memorial on that same day, horrifying the very religious conservatives to whom he’d made his initial gesture. The President did exactly what he has said he’d do: listen to everyone, and give everyone a hearing. And thus, like many middle-of-the-roaders, he antagonized both extremes. Happy to have a hearing of their own, they had no intention of listening to the othe…
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…keep wanting to turn Barack Obama’s election into a discussion of Abraham Lincoln. So when Ehrenreich states that positive thinking has its origins in nineteenth-century New Thought (a belief in the power of mind over matter), you can hear the sound of a thousand scholars thumping their copies of Walden with approval. Indeed, her chapter on the “Dark Roots of American Optimism” reads like a who’s who of nineteenth-century cultural history: Ralph…
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…aders who made excuses for him at that moment, who tried to rebrand him as Lincoln, as Churchill, as Cyrus the Great, Nebuchadnezzer, or whatever else, have not only caused a lot of damage, but I think compromised their entire message. More disturbing, perhaps, recently the Washington Post has run a couple of articles in which they’ve asked whether there is anything that Trump could do to cause these evangelical leaders to withdraw their support f…
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…example I can give of what they are saying is what Philip Glass did at the Lincoln Center on Thursday night with his opera, Satyagraha. He concluded the performance by joining the occupiers outside. He did have to get through extraordinary “security.” He started inside, with the swells who can afford opera, by saying “mike check.” This morning at Liberty Square we had a small ceremony of thanksgiving. The quote from Martin Luther King’s Letter f…
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