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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…ionists’ latest strategy. His is merely relying on what Forrest calls the “code words.” But their long-term goals remain the same: To get God into science class. The full statement in the Texas standards reads: “The student is expected to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.” (Italics added.) McLeroy considers common…
Read More…earst inherited from his father, responsible for the “Hearst Style,” a populist tongue of blood and cliché, expressive of the sentiments of working people but emptied of any real political content, and forever ashamed of that invention; he’d damn it in its own terms, describing Hearst papers as resembling a “screaming whore running down the street with her throat cut.” Pegler was like that, too; he filled the coffers of his publishers, but he hate…
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…dy for some serious War on Culture…er…culture war. So there’s Christian as code-word for ‘evangelical.’ Like when Republican politicians say it. And there’s Christian meaning Protestant, as opposed to Catholic. And there’s Christian the way a missionary might mean it, (as opposed to heathen?). And there are those “anonymous Christians,” or involuntary Christians…was that Rahner who devised that category? Does anyone outside of seminary or grad sch…
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…eld said that “Gen. Boykin gave many in the field just the kind of warrior code they needed to fulfill their duties with moral passion.” In an extensive, and highly-documented, review of Mansfield’s Ten Tortured Words, Rodda, pointed out that the book was shot full of a series of historical errors and noted that “Mansfield makes David Barton, whose masterpiece of historical revisionism, Original Intent, is listed in the bibliography of Ten Torture…
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…ys Sunil Khilnani in The Idea of India “recoiled from the vision of nationalist Hindus… He rejected the idea that past history was the source for defining future possibilities or orienting present action… ‘I believe,’ he wrote, ‘that a nation is happy that has no history.’” Gandhi’s Hindu nationalist assassin and his supporters were not going to “forget history.” They would kill him for betraying their “Hindu ideal.” Buber too was against religiou…
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…ke just one example, James Dobson’s sprawling conglomerate has its own zip code in Colorado Springs and a larger monthly print circulation than the New York Times) and argue that it will not so easily wither on the vine. The most jaded on the left simply assert that the religious right is the truest expression of the heart of the evangelical community and is thus here to stay. If the argument that “the era of the religious right is over” depended…
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…r living”). This is often lost on commentators. While scientists and journalists assess AA by the standards of the medical community (i.e. percentage of individuals who remain sober), AA members assess one another according to quite different metrics: levels of honesty, compassion, open-mindedness, and magnanimity. Although AA was instrumental in shifting the discourse about alcoholism from one of “sin” to “sickness” it nevertheless retained a foc…
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…conveyed this view in a very concise and pithy manner. The idea was first promoted by Christians. In 1853 Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper) wrote that Palestine was ‘‘a country without a nation’’ in search of ‘‘a nation without a country.’’ He made this observation during the Crimean War, when the continued viability of the Ottoman Empire came into question. With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, continued Turkish rule in Palestine came…
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…lear of causes, issues, or ideas that would place them in the progressive (code name for lefty-socialist) camp. In the meantime, the legacy media has muzzled itself, likewise fearful of the right’s blanket criticism of the “liberal press.” (For more on this see David Domke’s study of the post 9/11 press: Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the ‘War on Terror’ and the Echoing Press.) Returning to the initial question: why have American new…
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