Religion Dispatches
…and devotion to America even while being tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Everhart stated, “John McCain is kind of like Jesus Christ on the cross. He never denounced God, either.” McCain, the occasionally foul-mouthed and short-tempered Senator who has yet to be baptized after nearly two decades of attending a Baptist church, seems like any other fallible human to be a far cry from the example of Jesus. Although he did suffer during Viet…
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…French, British, and U.S. tried it, respectively, in Algeria, Malaya, and Vietnam. In each case the weapons given to insurgents ended up being used against the forces providing them. In this case, over 100,000 Sunni fighters have been put on the U.S.’s weekly payroll. Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division, explains why it is working, so far: “They say to us, ‘We hate you because you are occupiers, but we hate al Qaeda…
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…mith Colleges where he majored in English. While in prep school during the Vietnam War, he encountered “a yellow covered book with big black letters on the shelf in study hall.“ The book was Gandhi’s Autobiography. “My eyes were opened about what it meant to stand up to the mighty British Empire that occupied his native India, as well as to apartheid in South Africa.“ Clarkson told Religion Dispatches that that chance encounter was his “opening in…
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…e. And while I don’t agree with him entirely—marchers did a lot to end the Vietnam War—he is right to suggest that peace has its roots in the quiet compassion of the human heart. Compassion is the adjective Rogers used when asked how he wanted to be remembered, and it is the practice that he tried to instill in his viewers so that they would become peacemakers. So rather than donning cut-off jeans and angrily pumping a peace sign while marching in…
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…nation. In the name of God, King condemned America for killing the poor of Vietnam and neglecting the poor at home. Romans crucified Jews and Christians; Americans carpetbombed, mined, and napalmed the Buddhists of Vietnam. (By the way, unlike Jesus, King and Wright do not call their critics “vipers” and the “children of Satan.” Jesus was often nice, but in his demonizing mood he could be quite nasty.) So I say to you dear Geraldine Ferraro, if Wr…
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…no generic moral protest, but a specifically Catholic denunciation of the Vietnam War. Certainly, in this, they drew on the church’s social encyclicals (especially Pacem in Terris, which articulated the Church’s default pacifism) and on the protest lineage of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. As the cameras rolled on the protest, Daniel prayed, too, to the God of peace in whose name they undertook the action. But as the Catonsville Nine reach…
Read More…no generic moral protest, but a specifically Catholic denunciation of the Vietnam War. Certainly, in this, they drew on the church’s social encyclicals (especially Pacem in Terris, which articulated the Church’s default pacifism) and on the protest lineage of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. As the cameras rolled on the protest, Daniel prayed, too, to the God of peace in whose name they undertook the action. But as the Catonsville Nine reach…
Read More…in the South and savage attacks on peaceful protestors against the war in Vietnam. (Many of us forget that King and Heschel also marched as leaders of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam.) This is all the more remarkable given that Charter leaders were warned about the pitfalls of appeals to civility at their own program at the Brookings Institution in September 2017. Joshua DuBois, former head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood…
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…s to other people he despised. Kissinger had sabotaged 1968 peace talks in Vietnam in an effort to help Nixon win that year’s presidential election, ensuring the war would grind on, leading to tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of more Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian deaths. Of course, Kissinger refused to take any responsibility for this, and instead blamed the people whose country he had personally worked to shatter. In 1973 he told Brent…
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…ey roles in campaigns to abolish slavery, promote civil rights and end the Vietnam War, among others. The latest upwelling of left-leaning religious activism has accompanied the dawn of the Trump presidency. Some in the religious left are inspired by Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic leader who has been an outspoken critic of anti-immigrant policies and a champion of helping the needy. The abolitionists weren’t really leftists. Some of them were ra…
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