Religion Dispatches
…roclamations are not only irritating, they’re a disturbing index of our level of discourse about religion. Surrounding the Easter/Ishtar conspiracy theory is a toxic brew of anti-intellectualism, heresiological claims masquerading as historical ones, and simple sadism and incivility facilitated by new media. Last year, a blog called Bell Jar wrote a nice piece qualifying and largely debunking the claim that Easter is a Pagan holiday. It is true th…
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…gencies forcing their values on the pure, unsuspecting Catholics of the developing world by imparting a “lack of openness to life,” which is code for abortion and contraception. In case this sounds familiar, it was a favorite theme of Pope John Paul II, who blasted efforts to expand access to family planning for women in the developing world as “contraceptive imperialism.” During the run-up to the historic 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and D…
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…and a little bit shocked. You’ve seen the iceberg ads, right? Peterson’s well-heeled foundation has been running these full-pagers everywhere, at God knows what cost, to scare the bejeezus out of us and make us think that unless we slash Social Security and Medicare now, our children and grandchildren will be reduced to foraging nuts and berries in a deficit-cratered landscape. As far as I can tell, Obama is accommodating the scaremongers today m…
Read More…square with Christian faith. You talked loud about giving more funding to religious (code-word Christian) organizations performing social services and backed it up with little real money. (David Kuo opened my eyes to this.) This is just one example of the way you wooed Christians with good rhetoric and failed to fulfill your promises. Using religious faith as a political tool is what history’s villians have done, and I am afraid you may be closer…
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…re known to have troubling tropes, which is to say: all of them.) “Do You Believe” offers itself pretty frankly as a Christian version of 2004’s “Crash.” Here, though, the car accident brings together a dozen Chicago souls in need of Jesus: an older couple (Cybill Shepherd and Lee Majors) who have lost a child, a mom (Mira Sorvino) and a daughter without a home, a veteran with PTSD, an EMT being persecuted for his faith, and more. The plot is hamf…
Read More…fore and after his election, the ban violates the Establishment Clause by deliberately disadvantaging Muslims attempting to enter the U.S. After many twists and turns, the Supreme Court narrowly affirmed Trump’s ban, 5-4. It held that the final version of the proclamation is a valid exercise of presidential prerogatives in the immigration context. But Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion politely tweaked the president’s tail, and Justice Kenne…
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…he Remnant, editor Michael Matt praises Polish President Andrzej Duda for telling a television reporter that the country will not give in to pressure from other European countries to change its constitutional definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The Remnant adds a comment decrying the “Christophobic fascists running the European Union.” Seventh-day Adventists Church: Transgender identity unbiblical The Executive Committee o…
Read More…tatutes should be applied without potential or actual exemption for [the] religious beliefs” of parents. Deeply committed to “the basic moral principles of justice and of protection of children as vulnerable citizens,” the members of the bioethics committee called upon state legislatures to remove religious exemption clauses and thereby ensure “equal treatment for all abusive parents.” A decade after that call for reform, however, a majority of st…
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…hrough the leadership of psychiatrists, police “cult-experts,” counselors, freelance Satanism ‘experts,’ and evangelical pastors—individuals who shifted their workaday professional roles to performing as charismatic moral entrepreneurs. In both the 1980s and 90s, and most recently through QAnon, the image of gothic Satanic rituals proliferating through public media have exploited real moral crises in popular culture. In the late twentieth century…
Read More…other conservative Christian leaders met in Texas, under the direction of televangelist James Robison, to continue to plot what Kaylor describes as a “behind-the-scenes strategy” to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. In the second part of his two-part article, Kaylor reported: A group of pastors and other conservative Christian leaders from across the country continue to plan their behind-the-scenes strategy to defeat President Obama in 2012. However, t…
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