Religion Dispatches
…g on doing serious things there. Just this past week, in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, activists used Twitter to organize actions like seizing the office of the president and the parliament. A few months ago, when Israel was conducting its military campaign in Gaza, the Israeli consulate in New York hosted a Twitter press conference about it all, which included such profound reflections as “y Hamas launch missiles not peace?” It seemed li…
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With its heavily-promoted #ResistMarch, the West Hollywood gay establishment is trying to signal that the usual L.A. Pride routine of holding a big drunken street festival might be in slightly poor taste under current circumstances. And thus, darlings, we will pull on our sturdy shoes and march again this year, albeit only snaking our bodies through an affluent corridor between Hollywood & Highland (site of the Oscars) and good old West Hollywood…
Read More…s are and how the new administration will take away our religious rights. I suppose it could come to pass if the courts don’t reassert their authority as the third branch of our republic. And conservative Christians—when the voting tide eventually turns against them—will have no one to blame but themselves….
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…l resentment among the white evangelicals who make up the crucial block of Republican voters. The white Christian South was long obsessed by racial purity, both during slavery and then segregation; it’s one reason anti-miscegenation laws flourished and were understood to have explicit Biblical support. Given this theological heritage, it’s difficult to imagine Gilead’s leaders suddenly accepting mixed-race heirs produced by black handmaids, even i…
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…nts, and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.”) What is it about Republicans that seems to make them more credulous to fake news than Democrats? The answer to this question might have to do with the religious roots of today’s Republican Party in the Christian Right. Beginning with the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye, and continuing through church organizations such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition an…
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…t his clothing and mystery beverage were in violation of Liberty’s student code of conduct (as some students were quick to note)? Or was this just the final straw in an already-collapsing heap of negative attention? As a scholar of religion and American culture, I would argue that these aren’t the most helpful sorts of questions to ask. Rather, if we want to understand what’s going on here, then we need to think of this photo as a moment exposing…
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…re are contradictions everywhere. He leaves us with no plan for action, no code of behavior for the modern world, and no school of thought to belong to. These things we have come to expect from our moral theories, and “faith-based” politicians depend on them. There is no proof for the existence of God or that this Jesus really walked on the earth with which to combat the nonbelievers—I may be one myself, but I won’t let it keep me from reading Str…
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…ses through near-plagiarism, the lies of pseudo-historian and former Texas Republican Party chairman David Barton, a man who Mansfield described in the book’s acknowledgements as a friend and mentor.” Rodda also commented on Mansfield’s 2005 book, The Faith of the American Soldier, “a book in which he … defend[s] and prais[es] Gen. William Boykin and his 2003 ‘sermon,’ in which he stated, referring to the capture of Somali warlord Osman Atto, ‘I k…
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…that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez an anti-Semite. A…
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…ed by the devil, Al Gore and “the global government crowd”—in the words of Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher—and those who passionately believe that good Christians need to be good custodians of the planet. Two years ago I went to Liberty University in Virginia, the home of the late Jerry Falwell and asked a lecture room full of students if they believed in the threat of global warming. Not a single hand went up. I travelled up the road to t…
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