Religion Dispatches
…Muslims for. The illustrations for this article come from the Illustration Class for high schoolers taught by Julie Zhu at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, a nationally recognized fine arts camp in Sitka, Alaska. The opportunity allowed students a peek inside professional illustration, how to approach and research an idea taken from a rough draft, and then how to edit and prepare the illustration for publication while incorporating feedback from the edit…
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…n affect people of color who ascend to positions of power and influence in business, in the media, in religion, and in the academy. Whiteness has shown itself to be quite capable of colonizing the minds and spirits of nonwhite folks. White power’s future depends on this capacity almost as much as it depends on its perpetuation in the minds of people who describe themselves as white and who understand that they will soon recede to minority status w…
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…to codify Christian privilege and elevate Christians to a special, favored class. All others will be second-class citizens. As Chrissy Stroop noted in her Religion Dispatches piece on the SOTU, these ideas have been mainstreamed due to the influence of the radical Christian Reconstructionist movement. Right now, Christian nationalists are raging against the dying of their privilege. Trump’s State of the Union encapsulated this rage. And, as Americ…
Read More…at the computer and I hear a Grandmother in the Senior Adult Sunday School class that meets in the Sanctuary say “Speaking of people, have ya’ll seen that video about the population growth?” I remember biting my lip — hard. I remember sighing and feeling as though I visibly shrank behind my laptop. As she described the content I could see the wrinkled faces contort in shades of fear and disgust. And I could feel my inner Scully and Mulder rise up…
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…lly have a speaker who, Campolo-like, would attack the hypocrisy of middle-class and affluent Christians being insufficiently concerned with the human realities of poverty, but this never for a minute threatened our general understanding that when we became old enough to vote we were morally compelled to be “values voters.” And ours was not the most hardline Christian school in Indianapolis. While Heritage encouraged students to get involved with…
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…t a certain level of pathology is at work among white, working- and middle-class Americans. There is a spiking mortality rate in this population, attributed not to the usual culprits like heart disease or diabetes, but to “an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.” I would like to suggest that it is no coincidence that Trump’s rise and an uptick…
Read More…ty’s decision to make Glenn Beck a commencement speaker for its graduating class this year has caused a controversy — not because of Beck’s incendiary politics, but because of his Mormon faith. According to a blogger from Voice of Truth, “Alliances such as these are not glorifying to God, in that what association has God with false religions?” Nevertheless, the university maintains that Beck will “continue Liberty’s long tradition of Commencement…
Read More…Freedom” bills, which paves the way for sneaking creationism into science class. While lawmakers have denied the law has anything to do with inserting creationism into science class, I’ve written about how members of Louisiana school boards interpret the law here. Admittedly, Kopplin and other supporters of the Constitution in Louisiana have an uphill battle. Only three members of the House voted against the original law. State Senator Karen Cart…
Read More…hey work hard and don’t always get a lot in return. Like the urban working-class people I ministered to in Pennsylvania, there are many residents of small towns and rural areas who feel left behind, alienated from and screwed over by the financialized economy that sees them only as assets and liabilities. They are afraid of what will come next for themselves and their communities, constrained by memories of what used to be, and frustrated by their…
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…. Even professors talk about him with a shade of awe. As a freshman he was class president, but then he quit student government for greater things. He also has a visionary streak, and a knack for stringing winged words together into crescendos. Busy Notre Dame students need this, he says. They live in an “upper-middle-class Catholic Disneyland” and need to be shaken up. “I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an instigator, but—” he says, trailing off…
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