Religion Dispatches
…t the main reason for the Religious Right’s rise to power has been its capacity for political action, particularly electoral politics. Meanwhile, over on the Religious Left, many of the ingredients are present for a more dynamic movement. But the ingredient that is most remarkably lacking on the Religious Left is the one that made the Religious Right powerful: a capacity for electoral politics. Indeed, there has never been anything on the Religiou…
Read More…ngs in a handcart from Council Bluffs, Iowa, westward across the plains to Salt Lake. When I was a little girl in a Southern California suburb, I donned a pioneer calico bonnet and skirt handmade by my mother every July 24 to celebrate my great-great-grandmother and other ancestors who had come from as far away as England to build an American Zion in Utah and Idaho. As an adult, I have reclaimed the holiday. My daughters and I have a new set of ca…
Read More…ibed “active” and “faithful” Mormons made big news by marching in the Salt Lake City Pride parade to show its love and support for LDS people. With the 2013 Salt Lake City Pride Parade scheduled for Sunday, June 2, RD spoke with Mormons Building Bridges organizer Erika Munson to get an update on the group’s activities. What’s happened with Mormons Building Bridges since your inaugural 2012 Pride Parade appearance? The march last year was an ama…
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…ed. While neither of these cases was legally argued under the “Stand Your Ground” statute, they both were operating in a “Stand Your Ground” cultural context that cannot be uncoupled from race. Indeed, juror B37’s comments in her interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper reveals that “Stand Your Ground,” if not legally then certainly culturally, was operative in her deliberations to support her exoneration of Zimmerman. The cases of Marissa Alexander a…
Read More…nment. For these reasons he was unable to vote for the bill. That’s right. Utah’s junior Senator would rather defund domestic violence community orgs and rollback crucial protections than risk a little inefficiency in overlapping state and federal jurisdictions. Call it constitutional pharisaism. Readers with a longer historical memory might remember that Senator Lee’s father Rex Lee, a former Solicitor General of the United States, developed the…
Read More…budgets) over dogmatics. Brooke Adams, the polygamy correspondent for the Salt Lake Tribune, was on On the Media this past week to discuss coverage of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Noting that some media outlets give less than a full picture of the controversial sect, she said some members of the group attend college, use the Internet and empower women. “The problem is that we hear so little from this community o…
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…(and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics and religion. The reporting would come later, however. First came three days in an ashram, and I hoped for a 72-hour hiatus from the compulsion to connect. But this ashram sold wifi. Monks rested their keys and cellphones on the table during meals. And during…
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…k school, the July 2012 movie theater shootings by James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado, the August 2012 attack on the Milwaukee Sikh Gurdwara by Wade Michael Page, and before that, the 2010 Times Square bombing attempt by Faisal Shahzad, and the 1996 Atlanta Olympic park by Eric Robert Rudolph, who was related to the Christian Identity movement. As I argued after the Boston bombing: Some of these were committed by Christians, some by Muslims, and som…
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…et, block by block—they used prayer-warfare to expel the demons from their city. And they maintained a 24/7 prayer shield over Colorado Springs to prevent demon re-infestations. As with inner-city cockroaches, the price of demon-free living was constant vigilance. Alix Spiegel called some of the practices she saw at Haggard’s church “medieval,” while René Holvast described this new way as incommensurable with modern Christianity: Conversations and…
Read More…an Broadcasting Network’s revenue in 2006 was $246,986,289. James Dobson’s Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Focus on the Family had $156,972,266 in revenue in 2006. Pat Robertson and Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice/Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism has offices in Virginia Beach, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia and its 2007 revenue amounted to $42,658,159. The Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, whose Presi…
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