Religion Dispatches
…o hell, psychological instability of returning veterans with unprecedented numbers committing suicide, veteran services stretched thin—these are only a few items that come to mind though they only scratch the surface of the psychic, social, and cultural scars inflicted by this war. Historically and across cultures, warfare is often the most religious event in the life of any society. Is it any different here, in America, with this war? The patriot…
Read More…Latino Mormons, and the Church has enjoyed tremendous missionary growth in Mexico, Central, and South America. Over the years, some American Indian and Latin American indigenous Mormons have actively claimed a “Lamanite” identity and positioned themselves as the direct heirs of the Book of Mormon. (I have heard Navajo LDS friends tell me that what they read in the Book of Mormon resembles stories they’ve heard from their grandparents.) Today, the…
Read More…exas and Oklahoma in this group). Most of the others are from Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Idaho, with a remaining smattering of members from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, and New Jersey. They of course would deny that there is any racial agenda, but it is the state legislative counterparts of these very same folks who have worked overtime to restrict voting rights, opt out of Medicaid participation under Obamacare, and wreck t…
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…e as pregnancy and the “human sacrifice” of the native people who lived in Mexico before the arrival of Catholic Spaniards is cast as equivalent to the “human sacrifice” of abortion. Burke chose Our Lady of Guadalupe as the patron of his shrine for this reason—his opposition to abortion is a key to his identity, and to his response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Early on, in a May 2020 address to the Rome Life Forum, Burke said “It is never morally jus…
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…r asked whether there might be a connection between NAFTA’s effects within Mexico and the urgent need of Mexicans to reach El Norte, even risking death by dehydration to get here. Free market fundamentalism seemed to work out pretty well for us. To be sure, we could see the enormous wealth beginning to concentrate at the top of our own society. But as long as enough trickled down to us plebeians (and as long as we could get easy credit to keep up…
Read More…ater Horizon continues to spew millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal participated in a prayer vigil at the conclusion of a House session at the state Capitol. While politicians and pastors were praying for environmental solutions to the crisis, they read from 2 Chronicles 20:12, which says, “Neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon Thee.” Which is interesting, because even as Jindal is praying th…
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…in the 1830s: keeping and enshrining slavery in territory that belonged to Mexico.” Just as their forebears a half-century earlier, white Texans sought independence from a colonial power that placed restrictions on the expansion of slavery within its boundaries. Juneteenth is, in essence, the celebration of the end of slaveocracy in Texas. Although Juneteenth may be a novel to some, it should not be considered a blank slate to those new to the hol…
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…gender fluidity. He’s also used the phrase in the Phillipines, Poland and Mexico. He seems to have picked it up from the African bishops, who used it to describe foreign aid that comes bound up with conditions about reproductive rights and sexual health. But after dropping the phrase in Georgia, Pope Francis told a different story on the papal plane back to Rome. Josh McElwee of the National Catholic Reporter asked Francis what he would say to so…
Read More…in ten white Catholics (60%) and white mainline Protestants (59%) say the number of immigrants coming to the U.S. from Muslim countries is either too high or should be stopped. Fewer than four in ten black Protestants (39%), Hispanic Catholics (37%), and religiously unaffiliated Americans (34%), and fewer than one-quarter (23%) of non-Christians echo this sentiment. Same when talking about banning Syrian refugees or temporarily barring Muslim imm…
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…ch was robbed from him by the oil spill. There is an elegy for the Gulf of Mexico, whose plants and animals will never understand what hit them. There is an elegy for Kruse’s dead brother, a re-elegy of sorts, for a man who had his burial site despoiled and vandalized by an invasion of toxic murk. And then, finally, there is an elegy for Kruse’s death itself, in which there are at least three distinct aspects worth mourning: 1) the fact that he di…
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