Religion Dispatches
…ommunity. If every church said, ‘we will take over our community,’ all of a sudden, every community is taken care of. And all of a sudden what was a national issue has just been solved, because we solved it locally.” Of course, the school board elections of 2021 are just the beginning. At least, that’s the plan….
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…nabling their participation in the public sphere.” Yet, Afghan women themselves are not part of UNAMA’s policy-making circles, nor are they represented in UNAMA’s leadership. In 2021, Sharbat Gula received a welcome to Rome by the Italian government. While this resettlement may seem like a positive outcome from McCurry’s photo, during the few interviews that have featured her, Sharbat Gula points out that she needed to be resettled precisely becau…
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…lation passed quickly and was signed into law on June 30, 2020. On Jan. 11, 2021, just five days after the Capitol riots, a newly designed “magnolia flag” rose over the Mississippi State Capitol, marking the first time since 1894 that the Confederate battle flag had not been visible in that place. The civic landscape of the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, has also been transformed. During the weeks I spent there conducting r…
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…Both frameworks allow people in power to direct attention away from themselves and the systems they’re building. Climate change and systemic oppression are structural. They require structural solutions. So when exactly should Congress have restricted ownership of assault rifles? Perhaps when the assault rifle ban expired? After Columbine? Sandy Hook? Parkland? Las Vegas? Maybe after a man with a long gun killed 49 people in a queer club in Orland…
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…is often completely untethered from reality. Friedersdorf wrote in October 2021: “(DeSantis) remains a plausibly acceptable candidate for anti-Trump conservatives, in part because winning narrowly in a purple state has all but forced him to moderate his populism.” I’m not sure in which world DeSantis threatening companies with state sanctions, should they take a stand against his discriminatory policies, passing anti-LGBTQ legislation and policin…
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…polling suggests that only a little more than 1 in 5 Serbs describe themselves as supporters of Putin’s Russia in foreign policy, while half support continuing the Yugoslav-era policy of non-alignment. It’s not support for Russia or Putin which motivates the anti-Western attitude among young Serbs today, but rather a feeling that Serbia was wronged by the West during the Yugoslav War and Kosovo Wars in the 1990s—a wrong that many see as emerging…
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…Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility (Beacon, 2021). His most recent book is All Is Not Lost: 20 Ways to Revolutionize Disaster (Beacon Press, spring 2022). Zamalin is also co-editor for a collection of scholarly essays aimed at reinterpreting the American political tradition, American Political Thought: An Alternative View (New York: Routledge, 2017). His scholarly essays have appeared in various edited book collecti…
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…ate in a repeat of the Georgia run-off. Some small cracks in the GOP’s resolve regarding the Big Lie have become noticeable: prominent figures on the Right, like Charlie Kirk and Laura Ingraham, used the midterm defeat to criticize the focus on alleged voter fraud and demonization of early voting—which they themselves helped facilitate. Those who predict the end of Republican cries of voter fraud, however, are quite likely wrong: The GOP’s myth-ma…
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…aid as much when he half-facetiously wrote the following, in response to my 2021 New Republic article on originalism and natural law: [Schwartz] singles out First Things (“the most intellectually serious and influential journal of the religious right”) as particularly nefarious, leading the way toward (this will shock readers) a politics informed by natural law. I’m happy to endorse his warnings to those on the left. Despite this frank acknowledge…
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…re a powerful force, even if they rarely make the headlines. According to a 2021 report from the European Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), their pockets are deep. From 2009 until 2018, $702.2 million was spent on “anti-gender” mobilization, $81.3 million from the US alone to combat abortion rights. These networks are complicated by design, as Anne Nelson, the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical…
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