Religion Dispatches
…d. According to the Associated Press, the two-day conference was called to promote a global dialogue about religions, cultures and common values. The dialogue ensued. President Bush attended and spoke, and a statement on the importance of religion and humanity’s common values was issued. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins pointed out that Leonard Leo and Donald Argue, members of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, said th…
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…In 1954, Senator Lyndon Johnson presented an amendment to Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3), which was subsequently adopted by Congress. The amendment defined nonprofit tax-exempt entities—including churches—as those “which [do] not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” During the recent election cycle, the…
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…eveloping charismatic and photogenic representatives of the lifestyle they promote. To this end, VF creates a beautiful glossy catalogue populated with high quality photographs of [the] Phillips children and friends in romantic historic costumes and settings: Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colonies, and the Wild West. In these images, and generally in the literature and stories of Vision Forum, gender roles are greatly exaggerated and glamorized…
Read More…lthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for us to call them the filthy sinners they are.” As a Christian, who just also happens to be a lesbian, I take offense at this continuing campaign on the religious right to promote this false dichotomy of gays vs. God. No one in the gay and lesbian community wants to curb anyone’s “religious freedom.”…
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…ere a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? The DaVinci Code. Now, that’s a profitable reworking of Christian history. I wouldn’t have to worry about paying for my daughter’s college education. Seriously, I wish I could have written Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those magisterial books about history that has become part of history. Books like that happen once in a generation. Sigh. What’s your next book? It is on…
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…That is, they believe that Christ will return to earth only after the thousand years of religious rule that characterizes the Christian idea of the millennium, and therefore Christians have an obligation to provide the political and social conditions that will make Christ’s return possible. “Premillennialists,” on the other hand, hold the view that the thousand years of Christendom will come only after Christ returns, an event that will occur in…
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…leased in mid-May. Angels & Demons is the successor to 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, which its star Tom Hanks called “just a good story loaded with hooey and nonsense.” Of course, he only has to say that because it’s not true. Everybody knows that despite getting most of his facts wrong, Dan Brown is American culture’s preeminent religious thinker and, in particular, our most trusted interpreter of Catholicism. Even though the Vatican decided to play…
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…the Vatican’s two primary anti-Modernist documents: the decree Lamentabili sane exitu and the encyclical Pascendi). So much, then, for the history of anti-Modern Catholic theology. But there is far more to the Church’s new anti-Modernism than theology. What I would like to propose is an alternative account of the contemporary situation and the Vatican’s pragmatic, rather than theological, reaction to it. If one were to consult a map of the world a…
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…one has parents worth invoking. And every little step and turn of the talk promotes an etiquette that values open doors and natural achievement. The bride’s genealogy, for example, always precedes the groom’s. The undergraduate degree is one you “graduated from” whereas the graduate degree is one you “received.” Flourishes of detail are unnecessary (the names speak for themselves) unless they don’t. Thus, the employer of one subject is “CytImmune…
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…ample, American Christianities. I have very little confidence that prayers sanctioned at official government events, such as inaugurations, do anything but lay a sacralizing veneer over the entire proceeding. I don’t think prophetic transformation of public life is going to be fostered by the recitation of a few public pieties. I am very reluctant to move from the religious and political views of individuals, like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitche…
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