Religion Dispatches
…, isn’t because of that—although I am sorry—or even Mean Girls, one of the best movies ever. Or even that I had the biggest crush on you because of that movie. (A 24-year-old Pakistani nerd is like a 13-year-old lovelorn white child. It’s not racism, it’s anthropology.) I’m apologizing because I saw this morning, and now returning back to the coincidence, a story on Fox News: “Lindsay Lohan converts to Islam?” The best way I can describe Fox News…
Read More…enerally referred to as a Christian nationalist, largely because he is the best-known promoter of the idea. But as a former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and a frequent headliner at Christian right and Republican conclaves, he is also a Dominionist with considerable political reach. (The Jefferson Lies was on the New York Times best-seller list at the time it was withdrawn.) The Christian nationalist appeal is to, what historian Frank L…
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…ers to reopen the economy. Our ugly history of social Darwinism is perhaps best exemplified—or revealed—by the Tennessee protester who famously brandished a sign reading, “Sacrifice the weak, Re-open TN.” The now former chairperson of the planning commission in Antioch, California suggested letting the virus run its course to kill the weak, elderly and homeless in order to relieve health care and Social Security costs. These perspectives are not o…
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…ren’t associated with the Christian right. Ten is a pretty small number to best represent a movement Newsweek describes as “changing and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal scholar Melis…
Read More…ir intolerance of me. For those family members, ignoring them is often the best thing to do. Leave the room when they start in on you. (I told my therapist I thought this was rude, but she reminded me that if I told a family member that I didn’t want to have this conversation and they persisted, it was really the obnoxious family member who was rude and I had every right to walk away after that.) Perhaps the best thing to do this holiday season—if…
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…and 1940s work of French Catholic personalist intellectuals and on the spread of “human dignity” in Western European constitutions, beginning with the 1937 Christian Democratic constitution of Ireland, Moyn concludes that “through this lost and misremembered transwar era, it is best to see human rights as a project of the Christian right for the most part, not the secular left.” Is the advancement of human rights in the 1940s best seen as a proje…
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…the House chamber were any judge, the heart of the matter is that, in the best Niebuhrian “realist” fashion, a “contentious and frustrating and messy democracy” is proving its superiority to every other nation with its domestic “civility,” while at the same time sending its military forces to fend off a shadowy and (let’s be honest now) apparently rather ineffectual foreign threat. Whether the president truly believes his Niebuhrian rhetoric no…
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…sm as an impulsive, populist, misdirected explosion of anger from below is best encapsulated, as noted above, in the pogrom. Across Jewish history, Jews have often been the scapegoat for the economic disenfranchisement of the mass classes, who have their righteous anger projected onto an imagined picture of “the Jew.” Pogroms are a part of our ancestral memory, memorialized in everything from folklore to liturgies, and are archetypal for how we un…
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…er words, that in the worst case, theology and science were at war. In the best case, I assumed, they had a rather awkward relationship—something like bad first date. And then I read Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (Routledge, 2003). What occurred was nothing short of a paradigm shift. What Keller was up to was beyond me—in the very best way. She wasn’t doing apologetics (defending theology from its outside objectors)….
Read More…ition: Mr. Abbott, a conservative leader who is a polarizing figure at the best of times, is doing badly in the polls, two years after taking office. His position on same-sex marriage is only one factor, but it is one that analysts say goes to the core of his political vulnerability. “His issue is his inability to reach out beyond a core group of conservative voters,” said Jessica Elgood, a director at the polling firm Ipsos, who added that he had…
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