Religion Dispatches
…ed consent materials. JULY In July, Adam Daniels––a Satanist from Oklahoma City who is not affiliated with the Satanic Temple––announced that he would hold a black mass in September in the city’s civic center. This was met with a surge of petitions and protests from outraged Christians. Among conservative Catholics, a narrative had formed of how Catholics bravely defeated the Satanists behind the Harvard black mass. Some protesters seemed envious…
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…hey still cared for me. And I can’t tell you how many times I remember the phone call she made and the letter he sent. To the rest of you, those I potlucked with, laughed with, held your hands, loved your babies, went to your weddings, your sickbeds, your moments of crisis: Where are you? Why have you let me go to what you believe to be perdition? Are you just too busy? Did I never matter that much? Have I fooled myself believing we were bonded fo…
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…ing to get people to understand this without giving them this tedious background? I don’t know! That is an interesting problem. You’re talking about a great revelation that opens the Bible in so many ways and opens people’s eyes to new ways of thinking and considering God. I see the lure of reading it literally because it makes everything a slogan and a bumper sticker. It’s like you pull shades from people’s eyes and they say, “Ah, I never thought…
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…hemselves in the foot. In that case, 17,000 people die in the first year, around 25 million will lose insurance, and the GOP will cease to exist as a national party. More realistically, liberals are going to have to do some very heavy lifting over the next few years. It’s going to be much harder work than letters and phone calls to Congress, protests, or meetings with like-minded friends. You can point to the successes of Rev. Barber’s “fusion pol…
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…fight. If someone had pressed into his fingers at that pivotal moment the phone number for The Trevor Project, he might reach out and hear a voice of reassurance, a voice that gave him hope for life by, in part, repudiating the so-called biblical teaching that who he is amounts to an offense against God. If he’d had a sense of belonging to a community that embraced him for who he is, maybe his hope wouldn’t be so fully shattered. But while other…
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…ublic conversation about poverty. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” Reagan’s caricature of the “welfare queen” cemented it in the American imaginary: By the time the “welfare queen” finally emerged on the national stage, the American pu…
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…on her husband, like Republican gubernatorial candidate for Arizona, Kari Lake (who is, as of publication, losing by the thinnest of margins in an extremely close race), who quipped at a campaign event in Scottsdale: “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C.—apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.” Similarly chilling was the reaction of the other people present at the gathering: the moderator was laughing so hard…
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…mic populist, nationalist” politics of today’s GOP, and cites J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, Kari Lake and Diego Morales as praiseworthy GOP candidates in the upcoming midterm elections (despite the supposedly nonpartisan nature of the Pray Vote Stand summit). Panelists encourage the audience to “connect with local Hispanic communities and their churches,” and to celebrate that “we are consolidating the Hispanic conservative movement—whether Anglos or…
Read More…have been a helpful tidbit for Wills’s column. But if there’s no time for phone calls or web searches, well, at the very least, there are fact-checkers. And here’s a modest proposal for the editors at the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and every other publication that will be running a lot of Mormon content this campaign season but has no Mormons on its editorial staff: Hire a Mormon fact checker. There are a number of advanced g…
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…a, the rupture can be harrowing even for people who have never set foot in Utah and are one of only a handful of Latter-day Saints in their community. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi states, “Changing moral codes is always costly; all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this.” Mormons who leave the church face dire consequences: damnation, separation for all eternity from loved ones, shunning and judgment in this life, as well as irr…
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