Religion Dispatches
…ve—and Syria was dominated by a secular Ba’ath party. Yet, as I wrote, the New York Times, America’s leading newspaper, irresponsibly confused religiosity with a lack of receptivity to democracy. (Then again, if you’re the majority, of course you’d support democracy—a principled stand is sometimes a partisan stand.) Following the latest in the Egyptian military’s unprovoked assaults on civilian protesters, who reasonably enough are furious with th…
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…firing of prehistoric weaponry, God’s armies are eventually defeated. The new “elect,” i.e. the leaders of the new dispensation “saw with ravishment the Most High precipitated into Hell and Satan seated on the throne of the Lord.” But things don’t take a happy turn after this propitious outcome. In fact, Satan dreams that the trappings of his new office almost instantaneously corrupt him. No sooner is Satan installed on God’s throne, than he begi…
Read More…are nothing less than attacks on those values that are the pillars of our republic and the guarantors of our freedom. They erode our national well being. Those who commit these crimes do so fully intending to tear at the too-often frayed threads of diversity that bind us together and make us strong. They seek to divide and conquer. They seek to tear us apart from within, pitting American against American, fomenting violence and civil discord. Eve…
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…abbi.” Similarly, he delegitimizes the Forward, the famous American Jewish newspaper. He says, “Nor is the Forward a barometer of mainstream Jewish media. The weekly Jewish newspaper the Forward is over 110 years old. But it really ‘cut its teeth’ during the Great Depression in the 1930’s… The Forward’s editorial slant at the time was VERY SOCIALIST. In the ensuing seven-plus decades, the Jewish Population has eased back into the mainstream… still…
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…s would often try to escape due to the ending of crop season; but with the new law, it morphed into a time where newly freed Blacks could come together.” As such, Thanksgiving, like Decoration Day (Memorial Day), became post-emancipation holidays that were added to the larger constellation of antebellum African-American observances that we see in Negro Election Day, Militia Training Day, and the Pinkster (Pentecost) festival. But I am forced to as…
Read More…ntelligent-design advocates all agree: Steven Pinker’s recent essay in the New Republic is trash. “Unbelievable hubris,” writes biologist PZ Meyers of the essay, titled “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians.” “Empirically overconfident” and “intellectually unsubtle” fumes Ross Douthat. “Steven Pinker may have just pissed you off,” notes NPR, unnecessarily. Pinker’s…
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…ndidate who got his start with birtherism. And, sorry Ross Douthat, he’s a Republican. That’s the party he chose, but the Party, too, had a choice, and chose him, and every day more Republican elders are lining up behind him. It is unfortunate that, rather than own up to the indigenousness of the ugliness, Douthat attempts to find some other, foreign precedent for it, as if there our moral ignominy is ultimately derivative; it is no different from…
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…ive Republican nominee for president, was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York on Thursday, it was to be expected that the Right would take the news badly. And indeed—the various factions of the US (but also the international) right-wing have been in meltdown mode since the news of the guilty-verdict broke, threatening everything from violent retribution to killings. For those who had, somehow, still hoped that having a convicted felon as a n…
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…as Devouring Beasts that must be cut down to size in order for this great republic of ours to sail on in untroubled seas: This inter-generational issue is incredible nonsense. And the idea that anyone would support cutting these programs out of a desire to help the young is close to obscene. Among other things, the greatest cuts will almost certainly hit the young. So Ron Sider has told America’s youth that he wants to make them less secure in re…
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…quality (already quite ineffectual by the 1660s, as prosperity surged into New England’s maritime trading centers), to the radical republican emphasis on free labor that peaked between 1830 and 1850; an emphasis that reemerged in Prairie Populism three decades later. And always there were some religious communities (mainly rooted in Anabaptist traditions) that rejected private accumulation in favor of communal flourishing. It nevertheless remains…
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