Religion Dispatches
…was, in fact, code for Mormon, and that Obama and team planned to use the word “weird” as a dog-whistle to stoke voters’ antipathies towards Mormonism in 2012. The news set off a wave of cringes among Mormon politicos as well. Because Mormons do recognize “weird” as a word that sticks to us in the American imagination. In 1995, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in an interview with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, “We are not a weird pe…
Read More…ve.” Then, Lewis maintained, when the candidates moved on to Florida, “Fox News reported that Huckabee wasn’t campaigning there.” Sean Hannity, she continued, “said it on his radio show and wouldn’t correct it” and it was an “outright lie.” “You could’ve made a case for election tampering,” she added. I haven’t, naturally, reviewed all of Fox News’ coverage of the Florida primary. But according to these women, the alleged snubbing of Huckabee has…
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…last August. But the mounting frustration of chasing solutions is the good news. The Daily News piece “God Isn’t Fixing This,” articles in the Atlantic and Washington Post, the Nation’s compilation of candidate reactions to the San Bernadino shooting, Daniel Schultz’s parallel list of reactions relative to NRA campaign contributions, The Huffington Post’s collection of political figures calling for prayers and the stories on every news outlet… All…
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…ive Christians in Uganda. Soulforce is asking participants to submit their stories about being LGBT and to express their hope for reconciliation with anti-gay leaders. The campaign is ambitious, like most of Soulforce’s projects that seek to convert hardcore anti-gay leaders and organizations. Personally, I think it’s futile to go after people like Fischer or Engle whose anti-gay hatred is the bread and butter of their religious schtick, but recei…
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…the dominant groups are reinforced and maintained at every level. In other words, science isn’t science; it’s a way of bending the stories we tell about nature in order to support a larger political goal. It’s going to take a lot more than scientific evidence, rational thought, and reasoned debate to get people to accept the very real fact that in the scientific community, there is no debate over whether evolution is real. Sadly, most of the fight…
Read More…is so Mormon he’ll rename the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms the Word of Wisdom squad. Mitt is so Mormon he’d do an ad for the LDS Church: “I’m a husband, father, and leader of the free world. And I’m a Mormon.” Mitt is so Mormon he isn’t as concerned about getting American youth jobs as he is about getting them married. Mitt Romney is so Mormon he tried to convince CNN to let him bring a visual aid to the debate so he could turn it into…
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…who signed the letter. It’s also the church of a billion people around the world, each experiencing it in different ways, each living out their faith individually and collectively. And each of those people is qualified to talk about how they live that faith, whether they do so in the op-ed column of the Times, at a potluck, in the middle of the desert, on CNN, or here on RD. It’s when either side tells the other to shut up that the problem starts….
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…comparable in some respects to what Catholics have experienced, then? The word “Christian” has been instrumentalized to mean Protestant, or perhaps even more specifically evangelical Protestant, and then used to convey or withhold legitimacy. This was the language that was used against John F. Kennedy, too. And Mormons have a bit of an uphill climb. But there are people out there like Richard Mouw, who wrote a very nice post at CNN this weekend….
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…. rich black men and independent, vocal women) is not inconsistent with the Tea Party’s desire to take back our country. The important unspoken questions are: who are we and take back our country from whom? These bizarre claims based on free-association analyses of lyrics, videos, and public appearances of popular culture icons reveal fears about difference and a desire for homogeneity that is simply impossible. If individuals were to act on the r…
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…churches and families: all formulations that can be traced to post-Reconstruction black churches. He argues that these myths undermine rather than lift up their followers, leading them to believe, for example, that being right with God can overcome the structural racial or economic inequality these preachers pretend does not exist. Particularly with regard to Jakes, who boasts the most politically-connected, mainstream reputation of the three, Wa…
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