Religion Dispatches
…tion. The Christian Reconstructionist Connection Barton’s Wallbuilders Web site promotes a collection of “resources on African American History.” Much of the material is written by Barton himself but one of the essays is McDowell’s, drawn almost entirely from Rushdoony’s work in the early 1960s. McDowell’s discussion of slavery, written in 2003, comes from Rushdoony’s more familiar Institutes of Biblical Law. He attributes his views to Rushdoony a…
Read More…tegy has been to apply for landmark status for the current building on the site. Echoing the Temecula Baptists, US Representative Peter King said, “It’s a house of worship, but we are at war with al-Qaida.” King also argued that it was a bad time for Muslims to build a mosque. “Right at this moment in history, it’s bad form to put it there.” Want to block religion from encroaching onto your browser? Try GodBlock. The Obama administration is removi…
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…the gun on himself. As the news spread through the Israeli news media, Web sites and radio call-in shows were deluged with suggestions as to what this case was about. The first reports speculated that the background story was a Haredi gay relationship gone bad. As on astute observer of ultra-Orthodox Judaism said a quarter of a century ago “homosexuality is the dirty little secret of the yeshiva world”—that is, of the single-sex school system in w…
Read More…es being raised now in defense of building the center near the ground zero site. For the religious right, religious freedom is about “defending” Christians against anti-Christian bigotry. That sort of supposed “discrimination” includes letting gay people get married, not allowing prayer in public settings, and the like. In other words, the religious right not getting its way. The right is so dedicated to this narrative that it has succeeded in ref…
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…America today. The opposition against building an Islamic center near the site where the World Trade Center once stood, and the growing outcry around the country about the creation of other Muslim places to gather and worship, suggests that many Americans are not afraid to answer the question without hesitation. In the post-9/11 world we now live in, Islam poses the greatest threat to American lives and security; a nefarious, fanatical religion t…
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…to give help got hurt themselves. Others have relatives now working on the site, rebuilding the World Trade Center. How does an imam approach this? How do I, as an American and a Muslim, deal with what people claiming my religion did to us—New Yorkers, Americans, human beings? How do I explain that I was scared because my city was attacked, but I was also scared because people might blame me? I tried to rush down to help, but by the time I got fur…
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…and sisters. On the other, many in the Jewish community are doing the opposite: using their political and financial muscle to fight for the Jews against their enemies. Worse, in so doing, we replay our own national trauma, over and over again. My colleague J.J. Goldberg recently related a story told to him by former Israeli UN ambassador Abba Eban. Explaining Israel’s conduct in 1970, Eban said “you must understand, we’re a wounded people.” To wh…
Read More…strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site. We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel—and especially the anguish of the families and friends of those who were killed on September 11, 2001. The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circ…
Read More…ves. In one notable example, first published on Barton’s Wallbuilders’ Web site in 2001, Barton argues in favor of the three-fifths rule which required that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person for representation in Congress. Barton maintains that, while contemporary Americans are aghast that “we” could have ever considered African-Americans just three-fifths persons, the result was beneficial to the slaves, because the rule diminished th…
Read More…As Guy Molyneux and Ruy Teixeira write at the Center for American Progress site, voters between the ages of 18 and 32 hold good (but necessarily “big”) government in significantly higher esteem than older cohorts. At first glance, that morsel of information seems downright soporific. But for political junkies, among others, there is some significance here. As Molyneux and Teixeira point out, progressives trying to sell activist government programs…
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