Religion Dispatches
…ated as non-Jews and antisemites, may ironically find themselves rejoining the historical mainstream of Jewish religious tradition documented by Ravitzky. ¹ Song of Songs Rabbah 2:7, Babylonian Talmud Ketubbot 111a with Rashi’s specifications. ² The first Reform platform calling for “the rehabilitation of Palestine” passed by a single vote in 1937. ³ On Redemption and its [Illegitimate] Substitutes…
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…ionalists A crowd estimated by organizers at 50,000 people and by police at 13,000 marched in Warsaw’s 17th annual Equality Parade on June 3, which DW notes come at a time when the conservative government is opposing civil unions for same-sex couples: Poland’s constitution is one of seven in the EU to ban gay marriage and the country is one of six in the 28-member bloc not to allow same-sex civil unions. The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in P…
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…Rick Warren signed a statement of concern about global warming, joining a number of the new breed of evangelicals, much to the chagrin of the old guard like James Dobson. The press began to talk about the expanded agenda of the “new evangelicals,” an agenda not limited to the old shibboleths of abortion and opposition to gay marriage. The Five Non-Negotiable Issues Despite all the above, on a number of issues critical to women’s lives, he remains…
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…d under collective bargaining agreements—continued its steady rise into the 1950s and 1960s, creating something new on the face of the earth: a working class capable of enjoying a middle-class living standard. As late as 1973—also the peak year for real worker income in the United States—union density hovered at around 25% in the private sector. Today that number is just 7.4%. The bargaining power and the political clout of organized labor have be…
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…des Maher wants to make fun of. A contemporary Google search for “Webster’s 1828 dictionary” will turn up the swarming of conservative Christian groups praising Webster and, more typically, offering a reprint of the old book for sale. Christianbook.com sells the product with this description: Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language was produced during the years when the American home, church and school were established upon…
Read More…ight Americans is poor. One child in six is poor. … From 2000 to 2007, the number of children living in poverty increased by 15 percent… In 2007, the richest 20 percent of Americans had over 50 percent of the nation’s income, while the poorest 20 percent had only 3.4 percent.” In a piece titled “Fighting Poverty With Faith,” Steeland and Nordengren recently reported that “the ‘Fighting Poverty with Faith’ action campaign [in September] brought tog…
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…inant models of analysis: number crunching and psychology. Greenspan was a number cruncher, says Brooks, and unfortunately, human psychology caught up with him. Greenspan saw real estate values continuing to soar with no end in sight and allowed himself to be persuaded that they would never stop rising, and certainly would never fall. So he never had to think about petty psychological realities, like a crisis of confidence, never mind an actual pa…
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…folk to meet with Obama administration officials and to work together on a number of policy issues including Obama’s plan for revitalized faith-based initiatives, global warming, combatting AIDS in Africa and poverty at home and abroad. “Look for the stock of religious conservative leaders such as Rick Warren, Stephen Mansfield, author of The Faith of Obama, and Cameron Strang, publisher of Relevant, a hipster Christian magazine that puffed Obama,…
Read More…“We have to wake up Christians,” said the Rev. Gwynne Guibord, of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. “We have to show Christians and others that there is another way of looking at these things, a way that isn’t so antithetical to who Jesus was,” she said. One speaker at the conference, Rabbi Haim Beliak, who teaches at the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles and is a co-founder of Jews On First—which tracks Christian Zionism—talked about the growi…
Read More…ch of England itself with the appointment of Bishop Susan Goff, of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, as an Assisting Bishop of Liverpool. “The false teaching of the American Episcopal Church has been normalised in England and this divisive act has meant that the Church of Nigeria’s Akure Diocese has had no alternative but to end its partnership link with Liverpool Diocese.” Archbishop Okoh writes that he is convinced Gafcon is a movement called i…
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