Religion Dispatches
…itical appointee and current Senior Fellow at an evangelical think tank focused on religious freedom. RD readers will be familiar with the Frank Gaffney vs. Suhail Khan battle, which I reported on in January. (UPDATE: I’ve uploaded a copy of the ugly flyer Hughes was passing out.) As I discuss in the piece, there was one official and explicitly Islamophobic panel at the conference, the essential premise of which was that shari’ah law is coming to…
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…ecree (9:45 in video above). With remarkable theatricality Cahn and others used a sledgehammer to smash a stone altar of the pagan goddess Ishtar (who’s closely associated with Jezebel), calling it an act of “national deliverance” and urging the crowd to pray for deliverance of the capitol “and for the election.” Calling it “a mass deliverance, a mass exorcism revival,” Cahn requested that everyone pray for “a casting out, a deliverance for an ent…
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…ish the judge could act with more discretion. But that discretion itself causes the greater danger; hence the wisdom of our political system. Because, in the aggregate, the presence of such checks and balances ensures a more just society for all; maybe not immediately, but over time. So too with our government and our foreign policy. While, yes, it is true that consulting with Congress may have caused us to intervene far too late, or not at all,…
Read More…ably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of it—is temporary? Here it is, a cosmology for our times: a passive yet hopeful plea to a vast, personified universe. In the book, Hazel’s father credits this inspiration to a college professor. In interviews, Green credits it t…
Read More…ngry man to his right, “Some day somebody should take the hide off Peg because the stuff inside is so much better than the varnished surface which blinks in the sunlight of public approval.” That’s not to say Peg was a sweetie underneath. He was an angry man through and through, born into hatred of Hearst inherited from his father, responsible for the “Hearst Style,” a populist tongue of blood and cliché, expressive of the sentiments of working pe…
Read More…millions of American voters. And those feelings run so deep precisely because they are inextricably linked to values. “No Surrender” is not a sensible basis for making policy. But it is a powerful expression of a whole web of values that many Americans cling to for dear life, at a time when they feel that the world around them is swirling faster and faster, moving closer and closer to the brink of moral chaos. “No Surrender” promises that there s…
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…es that I’m going to talk about here had the root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders of our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall. What we have here, as Joe Laycock notes, is a meta-narrative of cosmic conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil. And Santorum’s views on academia are not incidental to thi…
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…rsations about the futures of people that lead to unbought, transformative politics. We can ritualize hope by converting our places of worship and prayer into engaged networks of action. Where guns have been used to diminish the freedoms of individuals, we can ritualize hope by parading to the polls to embody freedom—an act of civic responsibility transformed into a spiritual act of remembering….
Read More…s of the military, and that is protecting us from our enemies. The Uniform Code of Military Justice also prohibits things like adultery, so as we look at this slippery slope we’re on, what is the next step? Will we see a move to strike down that prohibition as well? Jackson and others speaking at the press conference also repeated the charge that repeal of DADT will cripple chaplains who will be forced to “water down their teachings” or perhaps ev…
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…? Both conversion and deconversion have led people to do good things, lead better lives, and work for a better world. Why is that so difficult to say without caveats? But if that isn’t possible for some people, if their version of Christianity won’t allow it, then it’s fair to call out their bigotry for what it is. Empathy must be a two-way street. If the tables were turned—if we claimed that conversion is dangerous and disingenuous, and that it n…
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