Religion Dispatches
…a report issued by the reliable Southern Poverty Law Center last year, the number of extremist Patriot groups has skyrocketed. Only 149 groups existed before Obama was elected in 2008. In 2012 the number had expanded to 1,360. Not all are plotting terrorist attacks, of course. But some are. In September 2012, Daryl Johnson, a terrorist analyst for the US Department of Homeland Security testified before a Senate committee that there was an “upsurge…
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…ask, “What could you accomplish if you had someone—something—like this?” A newspaper headline states: “Robots threaten 10 Million Jobs.” In the world of Humans a linear progression of android development has resulted in synths who match or exceed human dexterity and capability enabling them to take over a number of jobs, from waiters to nurses to 9-1-1 operators. Low-skilled workers have been displaced en masse, spawning the “We Are People” moveme…
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…ence do for us? The number of nuclear bombs used by the West outweighs the number used by the entire planet. Muslims did not invent nuclear weapons, nor have they used them. (Let’s pray that stands.) When Saddam Hussein was our ally, he unleashed chemical weapons on Kurds at Halabja, the only confirmed instance of a Muslim regime using chemical weapons. Even considering the possibility of Assad’s use of chemical weapons in his brutal war against h…
Read More…ondents believe interracial marriage should be illegal; 24% of evangelicals did. Sixty-six percent of respondents in Mississippi do not believe in evolution; among evangelicals that number jumped to 74%. Of all the respondents, 29% believe interracial marriage should be illegal; among evangelicals that number was 33%….
Read More…ne with “a California number”: Speaking from a telephone with a California number, Bacile said he is Jewish and familiar with the region. Bacile said the film was produced in English and he doesn’t know who dubbed it in Arabic. The full film has not been shown yet, he said, and he said he has declined distribution offers for now. “My plan is to make a series of 200 hours” about the same subject, he said. Morris Sadek, an Egyptian-born Christian in…
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…hing you had to leave out? Early on I decided to focus intently on a small number of newspapers, rather than try to tackle the whole range of black newspapers published before the Civil War. I’m still happy with this decision to go for depth over breadth, but it means that there are lots of papers that I didn’t have a chance to include. I would have really liked to spend some time with Frederick Douglass’ Paper, or the Christian Recorder, but happ…
Read More…o-powerful-bishops (who then turn a blind eye as you preside over a record number of executions) and occasionally make-noise-about-how-much-you-care-for-the-poor-as-you-gut-social-welfare-programs-type of Catholicism, as detailed by the New York Times, seems positively 20th century. The question now is whether, just as his brother used “compassionate conservatism” to attract Catholics to the GOP, Jeb can toughen-up his Catholicism—particularly his…
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…are unaffiliated with any religious tradition (“nones”), and of that, the numbers trended upwards among 18-29 year olds. Many news outlets covered the overall trend of millennials leaving the church in connection with the uptick of the religiously unaffiliated, but ignored the racial subtext of the millennials who chose to stay, and also were black. In all fairness, the public narrative supports why mainstream media was slow to cover this. Peter…
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…oss Douthat argues, in a surprisingly sympathetic and nuanced piece in the New York Times from a person opposed to polygamy, that the “new permissive consensus” built over the years by social liberals, most strikingly around same-sex marriage, is the primary driver for this uptick of support for polygamy. Douthat points to cultural developments such as the airing of certain TV shows (e.g. Big Love and Sister Wives), the growing polyamory movement,…
Read More…an with the violent attacks in Oslo. The full vision of his solution was a new utopian world order, free of Marxism, multiculturalism, and Islam, where the rest of the world’s religions and civilizations could tolerate one another. Breivik believed his actions would usher in a long war that would end with the deportation of Muslims and the eradication of Marxists in Europe. But his vision was bigger than just Europe. He saw a world where every civ…
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