Religion Dispatches
…cuse city school system. Three of the teachers were actively interested in promoting intelligent design. He suspects that the reason that so few cases make it to the public stage is that many parents aren’t always aware of what’s going on in the classroom. Also, children are often unaware that the teacher has crossed a Constitutional line. “A lot of times students just don’t know what their rights are,” Wiles said. Resolution Far Off On that day i…
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…e for Faith in Public Life, who urges citizens of all political stripes to sign Faithful America’s petition calling for the NRCC to take the ad down, told me: “Slamming Faithful America for expressing regret over the disgraceful abuses at Abu Ghraib is just disgraceful. Whoever wrote that ad should be ashamed, and its sponsors should not only take it down, but repent for running it in the first place.” Amen. Over in the Senate, incumbent Sen. Eliz…
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…profess. (“Honk if you’re for traditional marriage!” I saw blaring from a sign held by a young man in a black suit.) We Americans pride ourselves on our cultural diversity and our separation of religion and state. But this election has been an illustration of the difficulty most people have accepting the former and separating the latter. On a brighter note, perhaps the distasteful religious xenophobia in this election will help us more clearly de…
Read More…—even self-identified pro-life Catholics and evangelicals—who aggressively promote Obama’s candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.” Read the full piece here. Focus on the Family has prepared a video called “Election Update: Deciphering the Debate,” which “examine[s] how the presidential contenders handled a debate question concerning Roe v. Wade and the nation’s courts.” See the video here. +++++++++…
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…ries, universities, and other institutions.” P.E.A.C.E. is an acronym for: Promote reconciliation; Equip servant leaders; Assist the poor; Care for the sick; and Educate the next generation. “For the past four years, thousands of members of Saddleback Church have been testing prototypes of the P.E.A.C.E. Plan around the world,” the release continued. “During this phase, called P.E.A.C.E 1.0, more than 7,700 members volunteered on over a thousand P…
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…. But clearly things have changed. Black bodies in public spaces no longer signify the unjust denial of basic civil rights; rather, they signify “unjust” demands for preferential rights called affirmative action and reparations. Gone are images of white violence and black victims. Black bodies have reassumed their older meaning within the white imagination as the most powerful symbol of predatory violence itself. These bodies provoke fear rather t…
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…traditionally varies according to the Tibetan lunar calendar, in order to promote tourism. Of the various policies implemented by Chinese governmental agencies in recent years two have been the greatest source of friction between the clergy and the government. The control of the number of monks and nuns in monastic institutions, and the implementation of “patriotic re-education.” Since it is largely these policies that have brought the clergy int…
Read More…poke to the plight of the poor and spiritual well-being of the nation as a sign of their abiding faith in what Israel was called to be. By all accounts, many of the greatest Americans on record were politically treasonous in relation to government officials, yet spiritually patriotic in terms of the nation’s ideals. This is true of John Brown, Elijah Lovejoy, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Harper, Lovett-Fort-Whiteman, Pauli M…
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Over the last year or two, I’ve become an unironic, unapologetic fan of reality TV. I know the criticisms—they dumb us down, they elevate public humiliation—but what I’m really interested in is the way shows like Spike’s Joe Schmo Show or VH1’s I Love Money turn into morality plays about the value of friendship and loyalty. In the best reality shows, the initial rush of schadenfreude is gradually replaced with a genuine affection for the “good gu…
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…Rome in the year 312, the pagan Constantine I had a dream and ordered the sign of the cross painted on the shields of his warriors. When Constantine’s outnumbered force won a swift victory the next day against Maxentius (acting on divine prophecies of his own), he gave enough of the credit to Jesus that, within a few years, nascent Christianity was on its way to becoming the official cult of the empire. It is common to think of religion as a prim…
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