Religion Dispatches
…ther Dr. Freud or Allah was at work about my complaining yesterday, and so today I do not fast. In my younger lither days I would have to persevere through out the day fasting without suhur, but not now, not at my age, so I am having my tea as I type. No need to lie about it, no need to pretend. Missing this day is only an offense between me and Allah. The rules for remaking a day of missed fast, for what ever reason, will apply; and to these I hu…
Read More…a completely ineffectual as a political strategy. Harold Meyerson writes today of the Democrats “losing the big game” and how they “are getting clobbered” in the war of ideas: [T]he continual stream of crap coming from both Republicans and, of late, Obama on the theme that cutting government spending will actually create jobs seems to be taking hold. As my Washington Post colleague and buddy E. J. Dionne noted yesterday, when Pew asked responden…
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…ian Christian Lobby is attacking an anti-bullying program, arguing that it promotes “radical sexual experimentation.” From Pink News: The Safe Schools Coalition Australia (SSCA) scheme – which is also available in Victoria, Tasmania, The Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales – is fully federally funded and has been used to make schools in the area, as Brisbane Times puts, “more inclusive for same-sex attracted, intersex and gender diver…
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…ted slaves, he had little sympathy for the nascent labor movement at home. Today, as the abolition of modern slavery has become a favorite cause among young evangelicals, Wilberforce has become something of a hero to them; thanks in no small part to a 2006 biopic, Amazing Grace. As the new abolitionism enters the evangelical mainstream, however, it’s clear that his sin-suppressing instincts remain alive and well. Slavery becomes conflated in evang…
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…crats hew to the commonwealth ideal. The most intense ideological conflict today isn’t between Democrats and Republicans but between Warren Democrats who want to resist wealth’s domination and Clintonistas who are quite comfortable with the way things are trending. The related religiously-rooted rift in national politics is between leaders who still pledge their allegiance to the old “redeemer nation” idea and those in both parties (e.g., Rand Pau…
Read More…start attending LDS temple services again. That’s what I want the most.’” “Today, our authoritarian Church that once had an answer for everything finally said, ‘We don’t really understand everything about being gay but Christ has commanded us to love and the Church needs to become a safe place.’ I’ve been praying for this since 1992.” There is no change in doctrine announced at mormonsandgays.com: no revision to the Church’s position that being ga…
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…of this political and theological pluralism challenges the assumption that today’s Christian Zionism has been a unified and de facto stance for even the most right-wing of American Christians. After Israel’s creation in 1948, U.S. Christians were generally more concerned with the humanitarian crisis facing displaced and dispossessed Palestinians than with Israel’s significance to Christian eschatology. This concern wasn’t only informed by reports…
Read More…line “who advocated stoning of homosexuals,” in this case the Christianity Today article allows Roberta Ahmanson to paint Rushdoony as an man who spent his life struggling with his family history and whose ideas aren’t really all “that bad” but are misunderstood in contemporary culture: Roberta claims he wasn’t “the ogre” he was made out to be and explains his theodicy as a response to his family’s flight from the Armenian genocide in Turkey. His…
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…broad concepts—such as “tradition,” “Russian,” and “the West”—can grant in today’s political context, 30 years after the end of Soviet Communism and amid growing authoritarianism worldwide. References to the West are kept purposefully vague so that the Kremlin’s “pro-family” battle aligns with U.S. conservatives and White nationalists’ own culture war against “woke elites,”[22] rather than treating them as anti-Russian threats to be countered. For…
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…name George W. Bush for Andrew Johnson, and the point translates very well today. Our own Senate seems caught up in the mingle-mangle of its own egotism, and a case of the “hysterics of nervous bucking,” and there is no evidence to suggest that this fever will pass post-Election Day. And the House promises to be, if anything, even worse. Henry Adams continues: Great leaders like Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more grotesqu…
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