Religion Dispatches
…ent of the Iraq War, Regnery has added defense of the Bush administration, promotion of the war on terror and Islam: [This year] Regnery published two books that fanned fears of Islam and justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq and war on terror using the clash of civilizations language of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington: Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and Mark Sieff’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle…
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…Santa Barbara, California. Don’t worry about human suffering in the Middle East, the pastors taught, worry about God’s will. People nodded and took notes, and in that room everything I thought I knew about the world felt worthless before the vision of mystical order. Talk like this can’t be used: speak it, even hear it, and it uses you. You become it. Something similar might be said for pronouns. As long as we remain simply we, they will stay them…
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…rk, most of it in Southern Africa, with Kenya and Nigeria representing the East and the West respectively. While one may squabble about some of the choices—why for instance, Ghana was not chosen to bring more representation to West Africa—no one volume can do everything. This book is a product of a collaborative effort among the authors, Anglican scholar Cyril Imo writing on Northern Nigeria, church historian John Karanja on Kenya, theologian Anth…
Read More…r participant ever since. “Christian Zionist leaders have, for decades at least, been making coded and covert anti-Semitic statements and some of them have been pushing conspiracy theories that derive historically from such works as the Protocols of The Elders of Zion,” according to Wilson. “If one thing is clear, it’s that from now on there’s going to be a somewhat heightened level of scrutiny of public speech from Christian Zionist leaders.” “Th…
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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…
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…he Word of Faith doctrine, and millions of believers have incorporated at least some aspect of it into their spiritual lives. A 2006 study of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly half of all American Christians agreed with the statement that “God will grant material prosperity to all believers who have enough faith,” with even higher numbers of Pentecostals and charismatic Christians…
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…nd 39, which according to LaHaye are about contemporary Russian and Middle Eastern politics, he claimed that: “For the first time in world history the Russians are working openly with the Arab world; that kind of makes you think [the fulfillment of prophecy] could be very close at hand.” Asked about the impact of such thinking on government policies during the Bush administration, LaHaye began by claiming “I’ve never been asked that before.” He di…
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…toward the State of Israel in a way that was harmful to all concerned—not least to the State of Israel)… this and more was the context of New Atheist reaction. The problem I have with the more radical aspects of the New Atheists’ answer to religion—which is to get rid of religion—is that we are spiritual beings, self-contemplating animals, with or without the New Atheists’ permission, and despite the fact that there are so many national village id…
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…beral go together in that sense… Yes, in the sense that a liberal does not promote any particular belief. Which is not to say that a liberal doesn’t believe in anything. Liberals do believe in something, whether it’s the 19th century variety or the American left-of-center variety. But it doesn’t seek to impose a particular belief on society at large. And that’s in some ways held against it by those who want society to be overtly Christian, or kick…
Read More…as more and more interracial couples married and the sun still rose in the East and set in the West. Life went on as normal. Even those who had adamantly opposed interracial relationships, like the religiously conservative Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, repealed their prohibitions against interracial dating. In 1989, the Southern Baptist convention passed a resolution on race in which they vowed to “repent of any past bigotry…
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