Religion Dispatches
…close enough for vote-tampering to give him a victory. Was it “values” (a code word for conservative religiosity) or national insecurity? When Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville asked “Why America Wanted Change But Voted for Continuity” in 2004, they came up with the best answer: “A narrative is the key to everything, and the Republicans had a much more coherent attack and narrative… The president was able to keep the ele…
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…d appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube was just an idea, and wouldn’t appear online in any form until 2005. John Paul did embrace social media as it existed then. He was the first pope to use SMS to send out a daily message to Catholics in 2004, after brokering a deal with Verizon—one of the first troubling commercial agreements between the Vatican and communications comp…
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…d blog post on the issue, he still wrote, “I think Planned Parenthood is a code name for baby-killing.” Someone who thinks like that is not someone liberals can work with. And what could be more delegitimizing than Republicans clearly demonstrating that they’re no longer dedicated to democratic norms, to protecting the federal bureaucracy from politicization, to fairness, to democracy itself? McConnell’s Senate Republicans pushed through the confi…
Read More…who has spoken at tea party rallies and who claimed at Michele Bachmann’s Code Red rally against health care reform that health care reform was “against the law of nature and nature’s God” and “against the Judeo-Christian ethic that this nation was built upon.” Broden also appears in Maafa 21, a propaganda film that claims that reproductive rights are a conspiracy to commit “black genocide.” The film has been promoted by the Frederick Douglass Fo…
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When I participated in the Indianapolis Women’s March, I proudly held a sign that read, “I didn’t come from your rib. You came from my vagina.” The sign felt especially personal to me, not only because I fear the threats Trump poses to women’s access to healthcare and other basic human rights, but also because my very identity as a scholar pivots around a commitment to historicizing religion and unveiling its social ramifications. All of those di…
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…me foreign forces” he didn’t name. He also accused gay people of trying to promote themselves… Lokodo, a former Catholic priest who condemns homosexuality, has previously been accused to leading efforts to foil the public activities of LGBTI Ugandans. Serbia: Prime Minister names lesbian to cabinet Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic announced that he would appoint Ana Brnabic to his cabinet as minister for state administration, which would make her t…
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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…
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…al “symbologist” character played by Tom Hanks in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Semiotics is mostly dense philosophy and linguistics with a dash of neuroscience thrown in. The deep semiotics of health is an attempt to recognize the signs and symbols of health and to take control over the largely unconscious processes that affect our minds-brains-bodies. The mash-up of these terms is necessary in light of contemporary science. Let me explain. Psyc…
Read More…ose either secretly or overtly a Taliban-like, religious, strict religious code upon all Americans, which is ridiculous.” Honor killings, forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and other abuses are “un-Islamic,” he said, adding that there is “no debate among serious Muslim scholars about that.” As far as fear-mongering that that Muslims seek to supplant the Constitution with shari’ah, Khan noted, “there is room for individual religious pract…
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…torate, and encouraged them to download his voter mobilization app (the QR code for which was projected onto the Jumbotrons placed around the mall). This may have been the largest voter mobilization event this election season. Illustration in Mario Murillo’s essay, “The Daughter of Lies” Wallnau has been engaged in election mobilization all year, notably on The Courage Tour, which seeks to register and mobilize evangelicals in 19 key counties in n…
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