Religion Dispatches
…of emails: How is business since your January launch? Jeffrey Hawkins: Our business is building awareness, and providing training and education of the overall security for the Christian community; there is great interest and much work to be done in this area. Response to our mission, resources, and services thus far has been great. Will the Christian Security Network serve the security interests of religious entities other than Christian churches—…
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…ristian form, is a Sunday-only, simple piety, scripturally unsophisticated business. Conservative evangelicalism, like all other forms of religion, is entwined with all aspects of human existence. Religion is a vision that encompasses politics, economics, nationalism, gender, and race. Religious people don’t vote based on a candidate’s support of the Ten Commandments; they support candidates who promise to inch the world closer to their own vision…
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…. The day before, he said, he had been to a gathering of “pastors and rich businessmen” for US Senate candidate Kari Lake, a Republican. The Lord had asked him to deliver a “prophetic prayer” declaring that he would protect Lake and her family from Satan’s attacks and the torments of “Soros demons.” (3:40) Closing out the three-day Phoenix event was Jason Yates of My Faith Votes, an organization that has crunched data from the list of inconsistent…
Read More…er a government that picks and chooses where it intervenes. Farms and agro-business, yes; automobiles, sometimes; steel, no way. Thus the political left needs to explain more clearly than it has done, how the current proposals are not legislative pandering to its dominant constituency—“Wall Street interests”—such that we instantly share their sense of crisis in a way that we have never shared the equally grave sense of crisis among American steelw…
Read More…ther projects for the Fox News Channel. Here’s the release as reprinted on Business Insider: FOX NEWS AND MERCURY RADIO ARTS ANNOUNCE NEW AGREEMENT (New York, NY) Fox News and Mercury Radio Arts, Glenn Beck’s production company, are proud to announce that they will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News’ digital properties. Gle…
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…pose Roosevelt’s New Deal policies in the 1930s. That alliance between big business and conservative Christian leaders culminated in the 1950s Cold War, as exemplified in the anti-Communist development of slogans such as “One Nation Under God” and “In God We Trust.” At first bipartisan, Christian patriotism crystalized as a particularly Republican virtue during the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan administrations. Part of the recasting of the US as a uni…
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…wn her line. Operator said that’s priv’ledged information, And it ain’t no business of mine. It’s floodin’ down in Texas, poles are out in Utah, Gotta find a private line. ~ “Operator” In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented a device that could represent accurately the human voice. It thoroughly, irreversibly altered our interconnection, enabling us to talk to another person across an enormous distance with the sonic clarity of being in the same r…
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…s visible and therefore functional. An illicit affair, a divorce (or two), business fraud, a racist remark, denigrating the sacrifices of fallen soldiers, insensitively mocking a disabled person—any significant misstep may be enough to break the magical, often fragile social spell that binds the person to the symbol. Authoritarian rulers such as Trump, however, perform a sleight of hand that simultaneously hides the distinction between candidate a…
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…oblem that to many is even exacerbated because the church wants to just do Business As Usual. I know plenty of LDS people who are in no mood to do Business As Usual. Even in the heart of institutional Mormonism, many LDS people remain conflicted, sensitive, unclear, ambivalent, and tender about why the Church became so involved in the Proposition 8 campaign; what was lost, what was gained, and what purposes it will ultimately serve. In tenderness,…
Read More…d is one of the most ancient pitfalls of faith. The Didache, one of the earliest ecclesiastical texts, warns the first Christian communities against itinerant prophets who demand money in the name of the Holy Spirit. The Church of Scientology has built a business and a religion on that kind entrepreneurial charlatanism. But their business model requires good PR, and good PR requires a tight lock on secrets. At the moment, Scientology doesn’t have…
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