Religion Dispatches
…th WMDs, genocidal tyrants, and “freedom on the march” all crossed off the list of explaining what we are still doing in Iraq, we have only one arrow in the quiver, one card left to play. Terrorism. “Iraq is now the front in our global war on terror.” It was not so when we invaded the country in January 2003, but it is now. This war is the only war: the global war on terror. Terrorists, pursued with what can only be called a religious zeal, a pass…
Read More…y for them, as evidenced most recently by the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List’s California Latino voter education effort and the Vota Tus Valores campaign. But it’s curious that Grandin cites as his case in point for moveable Latino evangelicals the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, head of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Rodriguez, despite his own claims to be more of a moderate or at least a free agent, is already entrenched in the…
Read More…what’s the right word?—amazing? “Too often, female voters feel like no one listens to them.” (Really?) “They feel like they are smart, engaged and strong decisionmakers but that their opinions are often ignored.” (Do you wonder why?) The report, of course, is just spin, a carefully crafted campaign outside a campaign to try to tell voters the sky is green and the grass is blue, or that the Republican Party is different from the one on display duri…
Read More…aving aside the fact that the United States consistently ranks high on the list of the countries with the most religious freedom, you would think that conservative Catholic leaders who have been behind the promotion of the idea that we are undergoing a sustained assault on religious freedom would be ecstatic at Trump’s defense of “religious liberty.” But no. Princeton University professor Robert George, who has been one of the most influential thi…
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…aribbean religion, I cannot tell you how many times I get calls from journalists wanting me to denounce Vodou, describe it as satanic, list it as a possible explanation for a case of torture or ritual death. When I teach students about Vodou they are intrigued and often fearful; field trips to Vodou house temples evoke an excitement that no visit to a church ever provokes. When I teach Catholicism, I do not get inundated with emails from undergrad…
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…important work. Among them is Joanna Brooks, who served as the Mormon panelist at the conference. She has been an advocate for LGBTQ equality and acceptance among Mormons and more broadly (in fact, she was featured earlier this year in The Advocate’s list of “10 Pro-LGBTQ Religious Women You Should Know”), and I am glad for her work. We may not agree on certain issues, including whether or not there is a God, but she has my support. Her activism,…
Read More…Uganda” over the bill, I asked him how the U.N. and other “lobbyists” were promoting homosexuality in Uganda; not surprisingly, he didn’t have an answer. He claimed that the pastors there told him “a story about how it swept into — the agenda promotion, of the agenda, and now the actual proliferation of the homosexual activity sweeping into the boarding schools of that nation. I don’t know much of the details so I can’t take responsibility for wha…
Read More…now that God doesn’t call me to do a specific thing, God hasn’t given me a list, a Ten Commandments, if you will, of things to act on the first day. It’s not what Kelly asked, it contradicts what he’s said before, and he then proceeded to suggest that God told him to bust the teachers’ unions in Wisconsin, but other than that, it was testimony fit for a Baptist Sunday School. Rubio talked about the VA, and Carson apparently thinks the “bully pulpi…
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…Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher as religiously anti-religious Atheist evangelists, I have to suspect that the 7% of religious among the “Atheist/Agnostic” group, along with the 34% of their cohort who see themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” might be on the more Agnostic end of the spectrum. Likewise, it’s hard to know, in the end, what to make of what seems a startling set of numbers related to “belief in God or a Universal Spirit.” Here,…
Read More…of religious freedom. At the campaign stop, Gingrich, who has been fond of listing executive orders he will sign within hours of becoming president, added a new one to the list. He pledged that he would sign an executive order that would “repeal every aspect of Obama’s anti-religious bias,” a promise which, in true Gingrichian fashion, is sweeping, ridiculous, and impossible. But at his last stand in Florida, the idea of Obama as not only a destro…
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