Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 1xbet today promo code Moldova

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

…was not at all good. The Jews who first conceived of heaven as we know it today were under assault, literally, from their Greek rulers. Christians, at the beginning, were a marginal band, derided by the pagan majority. Islam was established in a uniquely inhospitable part of the world by people who hoped to rectify the social order: to turn the “have nots” into “haves.” For all these groups, heaven—a very specific heaven—was a reward for staying…

Read More

Christian Nationalism Was the Loser of Tuesday’s Debate

…st night’s otherwise circus-like debate. I’ll come back to what I do mean. Today’s authoritarian GOP is the party of white Christians and those who are willing to support an extreme Christian nationalist agenda. Today’s Democratic Party has thus become the party of literally everyone else who chooses to affiliate with one of the major parties in our broken two-party system. This situation makes for a messy coalition, but it also provides Democrats…

Read More

Opportunity Knocks in Pew Results

…ness and diversity of our tradition. Faced with the revelation that 73% of today’s American Jews regard remembering the Shoah as a lynchpin of their Judaism, I see educational and spiritual opportunity knocking. That three in every minyan don’t identify with a particular denomination intrigues me. Given today’s three transdenominational seminaries (ALEPH, AJR, and Hebrew College) I suspect that percentage may grow in years to come. For me that’s a…

Read More

The Anti-Gay Highway

…that only an American would be concerned with. But Kulah thought they were promoting his document. The other thing, regarding President Obama: do you remember when Gene Robinson was invited to be part of his [inauguration], there was a lot of outcry from the American conservatives? One thing that was interesting was that [Rev. David Runnion-Bareford] the leader of the Association for Church Renewal, wrote a letter to Obama saying this will be seen…

Read More

The Reagan Era, Still Going

…and capitulation to Wall Street leading to a colossal financial crash. But today the Reagan era is enduring in stranger forms than ever. Republican leaders want to bust unions and give another tax cut to corporations and the rich, plus eliminate taxes on capital gains and inheritance. They want to privatize Social Security, turn Medicare into a voucher program, reduce Medicaid to block grants, and abolish the Affordable Care Act. They want a balan…

Read More

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Lurid Picture of Nigeria’s Muslims in Newsweek

…of the country (the so-called Middle Belt), attempts to partition Nigeria today would leave the Muslim majority in the country’s northern third high and dry in economic terms. It would also plunge the religiously-mixed Middle Belt into endless chaos, as much based on the tensions between farmers and herders as on religious differences. Level heads in all parts of Nigeria, Christian and Muslim, realize the essential interdependence of all the coun…

Read More

‘This is a War Meeting…This is Gonna Get Dirty,’ Anti-Woke Capitalism, & American ‘History’: Day 2 Roundup

…n slavery in the US “two hundred years ago” because there are “more slaves today than ever” in the history of the world—namely due to sex trafficking. Carson rambles for minutes, calling for institutionalization of the “criminally insane.” A panel of Christian School advocates and leaders assembles next. Barry McKeen, Administrator at Grace Christian School near Tampa, Florida, describes how NBCNews published an article about his school’s anti-LGB…

Read More

How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…

Read More

New Book on Trump and Evangelicals Gets it Mostly Right

…merge with their national counterparts until 1968 and 1983, respectively. Today’s Presbyterian Church in America emerged from pro-segregation Southern Presbyterians and only recently repented of its racist roots. A key question today might involve the degree to which a Southern ethos, complete with its implicit racism, shapes American evangelicalism. This is a good and timely book. Fea is correct that evangelicals feel a sense of cultural disenfr…

Read More

Religion at Decade’s End

…Western-style political leaders like the Shah. We live in that world still today, and it is in this sense that we did not need the September 11 attacks to learn that a certain form of neotraditional religiosity was alive and well around the world.  What happened in the new century, and what has taken up a great deal of our cultural attention in the past decade, is that certain forms of neo-traditional religion became increasingly violent, very fas…

Read More