Religion Dispatches
…n selfish, slow to help the poor and needy around me, hesitant to give from my own abundance. If Joel Osteen is honest, he would see that while he is indeed living man’s best—and is a role model for worldly success—his ministry is woefully lacking when measured against “God’s best.”…
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Modern Family, which won the Emmy award for best television comedy after its first season, just turned on religion. But what was really interesting about this episode, called “Earthquake,” was the way it did it, demonstrating not just a cultural ease with secularization, but also a nod to the very American turn to nature religion. “…God in Nature, Amongst His Works” For the uninitiated, the extended clan featured on the wildly popular show offers…
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…l court in New York for allegedly violating federal racketeering statutes (RICO) as we used the mail and phones to discuss how to counter their efforts to promote pseudo-scientific theories in court. That suit was eventually dismissed but not before causing considerable trouble and expense for those scholars. Singer and Ofshe then refiled the suit in California state court as a libel action, but that too was eventually dismissed, and Singer and Of…
Read More…pornography, the Mann Act—any of these could be the underlying crimes for RICO.” The leveling of criminal conspiracy charges against members of the Catholic hierarchy would be a stunning denouement for men who, until recently, regularly met with U.S. presidents and influenced public policy on everything from women’s access to contraception to the simmering argument about transgender identity. It would signal that after a century of acquiescence t…
Read More…. But who is to decide what constitutes a “vice against nature”? The Portuguese legislators had been too coy to mention gay sex explicitly, and so a meaningless clause entered the statute books, which no court could act upon. This year, the Penal Code was rewritten. The new Penal Code sweeps away a great deal of the musty colonial legacy, including the mention of “vices against nature”. Now not even the most contorted of arguments could claim that…
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…ortified he was to be such a religious monkey, how certain he was that The Code of Conduct was all he should need, and how it was that that man, that eight-year President, made him be so very evangelical in order to win back the very party that (once upon a time, not so long ago) made him lose a primary by calling his daughter black. But for now, we just have this man, this testifying and freewheeling man who has made his own choices (in word and…
Read More…ortified he was to be such a religious monkey, how certain he was that The Code of Conduct was all he should need, and how it was that that man, that eight-year President, made him be so very evangelical in order to win back the very party that (once upon a time, not so long ago) made him lose a primary by calling his daughter black. But for now, we just have this man, this testifying and freewheeling man who has made his own choices (in word and…
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…f his campaign with Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA youth organization to promote Donald Trump.) Some claim that Feucht is not NAR (or say nothing about his affiliation at all). However a simple look at his bio shows otherwise. Feucht was a volunteer worship leader at Bethel Church, headed by Apostle Bill Johnson, and went on to form his own ministry Burn 24-7, which has a Spiritual Oversight board listed on its website, comprising prominent NAR…
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…e contemporary Jewish community who “live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans” (in Milton Himmelfarb’s still-apt phrase) abandon American Jews’ traditional allegiance to trade unionism? Will increasingly affluent Roman Catholics likewise begin to ditch the solidaristic ethic that has meant so much to earlier generations of US Catholics? There is some evidence that growing numbers of white Catholics share at least some of the negative vi…
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…in New York, which has an enormous pedigree, has done wonderful things in promoting a way of life and developing American society, but at the end of the day is still socialist. This is a slightly disguised echo of the charge that has circulated among anti-Semites at least as early as the October 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia when a pamphlet titled “The Jewish Bolshevism” was circulated along with the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion…
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