Religion Dispatches
…Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, “cuts in low-income programs appear likely to account for at least $2.9 trillion — or nearly two-thirds” of the $4.5 trillion in cuts in the Ryan proposal, including cuts to Medicaid, Pell grants, food stamps, and other programs. CBPP president Robert G…
Read More…y, another Christocrat favorite whose willingness to substitute prayer for policy rivals Bachmann’s. (Applying Brooksian logic, at what point does one deem the GOP not a “normal” party?) In Time today, Amy Sullivan highlights Perry’s ties to the religious right, and zeroes in on David Lane, organizer of Renewal and Restoration Projects, and their associated Pastors’ Policy Briefings. When I wrote about Lane’s activities back in 2007 and 2008, it w…
Read More…ystem of producing losers and winners is largely arbitrary and needs to be changed, and we’re not going to get market change until we understand, paradoxically, that the market can’t do it all. Without the freedom to walk away from the market, there is no freedom to be anything but at the mercy of the market. It’s almost impossible to be entirely free of the market these days, but it is possible, and politically feasible, to decouple social and ma…
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…hostile government or whether it’s free, prosperous and blessed.” Historic changes in nations, Wallnau asserts, come through reformation, and “cultural change comes from the top down and rarely, if ever, from the bottom up.” Reporters should also note that this is at odds with the bottom-up view expressed by other movement leaders in their 2022 statement about NAR and Christian Nationalism. Arguably it’s a distinction without a difference, because…
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…w Yorker recently: “The idea is simply that many different kinds of social change are connected to a plot by a cabal of élites to eradicate the white race, which people in this movement believe is their nation. It connects things such as abortion, immigration, gay rights, feminism, residential integration—all of these are seen as part of a series of threats to the white birth rate. One thing you’ll notice in the manifestos and in the talking point…
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…millennials for “killing” industries that are succumbing to macroeconomic changes driven by greed at the top. Did you know, for example, that “Faith Groups Increasingly Join the Fight Against Climate Change”? At least that’s the claim made in an article published earlier this month that provides no data to support the notion that faith groups are more involved in fighting climate change now than they’ve been in the past. Toward the end, this arti…
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…t of what this latest outrage is meant to facilitate: to turn any cultural change, however small, into a story of victimization. This is the powerful driving force behind the Right’s grievances, and it provides them with permission to “hit back” as a form of “defense.” By framing change or progress as an existential threat, the Right creates a siege mentality which is essential to the victimization narrative—no easy thing to do if your movement is…
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…despread democratic reforms in the Arab world, then I would expect that to change us too, by forcing us to take the human consequences of our foreign policy in the region more seriously. But after listening to the recent Republican debates and to the Obama administration’s defense of its drone assassination program, I think that particular transformation is going to take a while. This is a book whose lead characters are almost all Arabs and Muslim…
Read More…concept of the Big Bang, and embraced the scientific consensus on climate change. Of course, defining human experience isn’t quite the same as measuring the level of the ocean. Psychological definitions are openly subjective—and reflective of ideology—in a way that a theory of evolution or a model of climate change is not. Still, this is what it looks like when a major religious authority parts ways with an emerging scientific consensus. At the v…
Read More…next 90 years? How would a shift of Anglican-Catholics to Vatican loyalty change the Catholic Church? The Anglican Church? What will all this church resistance to cultural change mean for equality in the future? As I have reported on RD previously, the media tends to greatly exaggerate the death of the Anglican Communion. In this instance, they made the mistake of assuming that UK Anglicans function like their US counterparts. A quick romp throug…
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