Religion Dispatches
…ough these troops were re-deployed to Baghdad—where they joined a surge of new American forces dispatched to patrol neighborhoods and make them more secure—they were not replaced in the al Anbar countryside. With no US military around to hate—and with American financial support for their new security operations—local militias turned their attention away from America and toward another enemy, the al Qaeda forces that had infiltrated the resistance…
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…rprise, Amway leaders have made billions by selling a phony version of the American Dream, while bilking thousands of ordinary American dreamers out of their hard-earned life savings. The wealth of the founders has supported the nearly 30+ year conservative makeover of American society through millions of dollars in donations to the creation and development of right-wing institutions and causes. ++++++++++ Rethinking Redemption: The Case of Charle…
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…ued that acts such as the burning of the Qur’an, while legal, provoke anti-American sentiment and endanger American troops, Westboro’s Tim Phelps argues that it’s the invasion of Muslim nations and the killing of countless civilians that has inspired violence by Muslims. The media, he says, ignores these civilian deaths, “as if their lives did not matter at all,” instead calling down wrath on religious believers exercising their rights to free spe…
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…a democracy: the sacrifice of freedoms in the fight for freedom; economic ruin in the name of ever-expanding military power; the deterioration of governmental checks and balances in the interest of presidential authority. Ironically, the most openly religious American President of all time has inflicted the worst kinds of sacrilege on the body politic, and utterly underestimated the spiritual demands of growing numbers of Americans who are beginni…
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…orts of emotions along the way. But they also see and experience something new about the world. I think my book will have a similar effect. I hope readers find it a wild ride that sometimes pisses them off but leaves them with a feeling that they understand the American experience a bit better. What alternative title would you give the book? How about “Scott Geeks Out.” And to save time in answering the question that always comes up, I would have…
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…a successful monument makes it hard to imagine its setting without it. The American Atheists monument fails on both counts. When granted the opportunity to memorialize atheism in a public place, American Atheists decided to install a bench. In one sense, this is a clever idea, in that it reflects the utilitarian impulse of American atheism. But a bench is also something that you put your butt on. And this particular bench is an eyesore. About five…
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…ld Trump, praising the Brexit vote even as financial markets tanked on the news. Newt Gingrich said the Brexit vote gave Americans “fresh hope that they, too, can shrug off a radical and heavy-handed Obama administration, whose goal is to ‘fundamentally transform’ or nation into just another liberal neighborhood in the global community.” Ted Cruz said the British people “will no longer outsource their future to the E.U.,” and said the U.S. can lea…
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…nt election. More the shame, for in this age of rekindled culture wars, of newly ubiquitous bomb threats and explicitly fascist posters on college campuses featuring swastikas and endorsements of violence, we needed not A Book of American Martyrs, but the book it could have been. This is a resolutely political book—one that seems intent on representing and stimulating actual conversation across difference, highlighting logic and nuance across a sp…
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…lesbians. On the outside there is the rise of political Islam before which American geo-politics have been relatively ineffective. Trump is racializing the American nation. But conservative evangelicals are not white nationalists; they are Christian nationalists: Only as a people chosen by God can America stand strong. A majority of Republican voters subscribe to the view that Islam is fundamentally contradictory to Western values. For old-guard c…
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…r in the lifetime of anyone present here, has the religious liberty of the American people been as threatened as it is today.” So it’s hardly surprising that at his address to the breakfast Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence, who was introduced by Anderson, played to the crowd, touting the Trump administration’s executive order on “religious liberty” and plans to eviscerate the contraceptive mandate: President Trump stands for the religious libert…
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