Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…overnment went so far as to block all access to Twitter in the country because of objections to “blasphemous content.” The IHEU reports being contacted by an increasing number of secularist groups organizing on Facebook, including groups in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan. In all of this, the United States is an anomaly since it rejects even laws against religious ha…
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…aded, saying that she didn’t lose because she opposed gay marriage but because she’s “a dumb b***h.” In the following days, Ms. Prejean became something of a cause célèbre for many on the religious right, including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. Bad Theology Leads to Bad Ethics For my part, beauty pageants ceased to be of interest some time ago. In my opinion they are exercises in the banality of soft-core pornography; a feminist critique tha…
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…ced the First Amendment Defense Act, which sought to elevate those who espouse conservative Christian views on sexuality and gender to a federally protected class—a goal that seems to track with Moore’s own Reconstructionist tendencies.) But the precise makeup of the Senate for the bulk of Moore’s term is still undetermined—and regardless, Democrats face a Sisyphean battle when it comes to turning the Senate blue in 2018. Like many of the bills in…
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…singly rare traits. Many of us who seek to defend in advance progressive causes believe that there is a bloc of justices on the Supreme Court—two of them Trump appointees—that has dispensed with a partiality, barely clinging to the fig leaf for the sake of the court’s legitimacy. In some fields, such as reproductive justice with a separation of state and church, even the pretense is all but gone. But that comes with a cost. The court has a legitim…
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…First, Douthat warns of encroaching “scientism” which, in this context, is code for failing to believe the supernatural truth claims of Christianity. Second, paradoxically, Douthat perceives a tendency among non-religious people to embrace the mystical belief systems that he himself rejects, like astrology or wellness. (So much for scientism!) Yet we don’t see any actual evidence that these trends are as widespread among the deconverted as he sugg…
Read More…paration of church and state—as some progressives hope he will do—he might use his Notre Dame podium-cum-pulpit to address an audience both near and wide: American Catholics. American Catholics, if the polls are right, have not been a problem for Obama on the political front, at least not yet. Fifty-four percent of them voted for him in November; 45 percent of mass-going Catholics did. But ever since Ronald Reagan swiped it from the Democrats, the…
Read More…there is a thin line between making too much of the ties among people because they have contact with each other and erring on the side of caution—thereby missing important influences . But Lizza’s essay gives us a solid starting point for exploring Bachmann’s influences: her law school mentor John Eidsmoe. (“Solid” because Lizza quotes Eidsmoe saying he believes Bachmann’s views are in line with his own, and quotes Bachmann praising Eidsmoe.) Wh…
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…e same as naming a mountain or charting the source of a river, though, because, once again, race is not a natural feature. It’s a classification; a taxonomic tool; a construct. And it generally reveals more about the seer than about the object of sight. The human form is diverse. Maybe these explorers did see people whom a modern American would code as white. Maybe not. As Robinson demonstrates in The Lost White Tribe, the better questions here ha…
Read More…bian, 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.” What our community is fighting for is our freedom to not be abused in the name of religion and to not have our freedoms curtailed or denied in the name of religion. The ultimate goal of gay and lesbian people, in my opinion, is to call us all to…
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