Deals 1 800-299-7264 Cheap Flights from Shanghai to San Francisco – United Airlines | Search Results | Religion Dispatches

A Monumentally Different Kirk Cameron

By Julie Ingersoll

…they are anything but. Cameron recently returned from the Reconstructionist-inspired San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival (SAICFF) hosted by Doug Phillips and Vision Forum (I wrote about SAICFF and his previous participation here and here) where he and Phillips discussed the theological background to the version of American history presented in the film, showing the subtle influence of Christian Reconstructionism and R.J. Rushdoony’s Bi…

The Higher the Dome, The Closer to God: “Megachurches” Explores the Arid Architecture of America’s New Sanctuaries

By Anita Little

…eeriness of all the images together was intentional or if it’s just an eye-of-the-beholder thing? It just is what it is. That’s what it looks like. That’s what that strain of faith looks like. Like the look of Catholic cathedrals is very different from megachurches because there really is an idea of the divine in the architecture. Megachurches are more about having a big enough space for everyone to fit in, so it’s really not about this feeling o…

Chatting with Myanmar’s Buddhist “Terrorist”

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…prehensive about the 2015 elections and the likely candidacy of Nobel Prize-winning Burmese leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. Some thought that by creating an artificial threat the military’s party would be seen as strong defenders of the nation, and they would gain in the upcoming elections as a result. Wirathu has been ranting against Muslims for some time and in 2003 was put in prison for inciting violence against them. He was released in 2010, about t…

Trump, Islamophobia, and the Philly Pig’s Head Incident

By David Krueger

….” GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump wins the award for Islamophobe-in-chief for his statements that he would require Muslims in the U.S. to be registered in a database and stop Muslim immigrants from coming into the United States. Upping the ante on Tuesday, he made comparisons between his policies and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy to place Japanese Americans in internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. All of this…

This Year in Satanism

By Joseph Laycock

…st amendment and what we mean when we talk about “religion.” Here’s a month-by-month break down of 2014’s Satanic controversies. JANUARY In an interview for Religion Dispatches, Greaves explained that his goal is not to promote Satanic worship but to demonstrate why the establishment clause must be applied consistently. He stated that although he does not believe in a supernatural Satan, his group is a religion because it has shared set of values,…

Planned Parenthood ‘Stung’ By Lila Rose

By Bill Berkowitz

…in a video Rose had recently posted.” In July, she once again “posed… as a 14-year-old impregnated by a 31-year-old; a Planned Parenthood staffer says, ‘Just say you have a boyfriend, 17-years-old, whatever.’” The Orange County Board of Supervisors also “voted to suspend a grant worth nearly $300,000 to Planned Parenthood that was earmarked for sex education, not abortions… [after] a conservative Tustin businessman raised the issue with Superviso…

Should I Scream and Shout, Should I Speak of Love?: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 2

By Mark Dery

…ght of October 25, 1974 in a San Diego suburb hard by the Mexican border, a 14-year-old me kneels close to the TV, flicker bathing my rapt face. It’s the only light in the house. I’m watching Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1973 film of Bowie’s farewell performance as Ziggy, on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert—the same broadcast that’s saving the bored teenage souls of Madeline and her friend Lisa, somewhere in New York. Down the…

A Catholic Turnabout on Abortion or More Sympathy for the Bishops?

By Daniel C. Maguire

…the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that Peru had violated the rights of a 17-year-old girl who was forced to carry to term an anencephalitic fetus, missing most of its forebrain, and unable to survive outside the womb. The International Covenant on Civil and Political rights ordered Peru to pay reparations and establish a framework for women to access therapeutic abortions. In 2006, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights made Mexico pay $…

Billy Graham, Most Famous Religious Figure of 20th C, Dies at 99

By Randall Balmer

…Jones College, Graham worked the summer of 1936 as a highly successful door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. He spent only the fall semester at the famously fundamentalist school, then located in Cleveland, Tennessee, before transferring to Florida Bible Institute. Jones, the school’s founder and president, had tried to bully Graham into staying at Bob Jones College, warning that “if you leave and throw your life away at a little cou…

When Muhammad Ali Met Billy Graham

By Paul Harvey

…and the House Republicans will be just another brick in Trump’s wall. Ryan’s resurrection of compassionate conservatism and the elder Graham’s more capacious visions for evangelical embrace of others have fallen, like George Foreman in 1974, to a rope-a-dope strategy. *Note: a special thanks to John Schmalzbauer for the newspaper references to the Ali-Graham meeting in 1979 linked above **Correction: an earlier version incorrectly attributed this…