Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 1xbet today promo code Romania

The Traitor Chaplain Who Gave Government Prayer to America — A 4th of July Corrective

…a Friend to his Country.” The motion passed. Now, when we hear that story today, it’s often used to suggest that people who oppose elected officials abusing government power to impose their religion on others are the “bigots” that Sam Adams disclaimed. That ignores the fact that this was still a British colony with an established church and that the U.S. Constitution wouldn’t invent the separation of church and state for another 15 years or so. B…

Read More

What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

…what is literally unbelievable. As Laderman suggests, we may be witnessing today what a politics of Republicanity grounded in the necessary absurdity of belief will look like. And it is not always a pretty picture. But it’s important to emphasize just how Christian the culture of argument currently embodied in one portion of the GOP appears to be. Or rather, just how Tertullian a portion of this emerging Republican theology has become. To make one…

Read More

Why is the Pope Popular Among Nones?

…d), and the KKK unleashed verbal attacks on Catholics in the 20th century. Today, public suspicion of Catholics is less overt, but still present, and sometimes that takes the form of attacks on the pope. In addition, the current pope’s reluctance to identify too closely with culture warriors on the right has brought even more criticism making it more difficult to identify the roots of the pope’s critics. Brietbart bemoaned Francis’ failure to “fig…

Read More

Should We Pronounce the Religion-Science Dialogue Dead on Arrival?: A Response to Robert Tapp

…hrases are mine: • Postmodern perspectives are a two-edged sword: they can promote new kinds of dialogue, but they can also collapse into an extreme relativism that is scarcely productive. Fair enough; the danger is real. Saying that science is “just another linguistic system” plays well in humanities departments and at certain Ivy League divinity schools. But it makes about as much contact with real science as astrology does. Still, major cultura…

Read More

First Things First: Sexual Equality Just Is

…y can expect “abortion, depression, and a string of failed relationships.” Today’s women are woody-killers because they’re just too much like men. They are assertive, thanks to education and career training. They masturbate. They are surprisingly not turned on (quo) by their partners doing dishes (quid). They are, in short, nasty. It was entirely unrealistic to expect “that the financial independence of women would have wholly positive effects on…

Read More

Why Has the Critique of Hypocrisy Run Out of Steam?

…ss of pretense. Our old friend self-deception But the hypocrisy we witness today may not be so much acts of pretense and public false performance as self-deception. In Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations, Béla Szabados and Eldon Soifer suggest that our perception of hypocrisy has shifted in modern times. If Biblical and Medieval thinkers saw hypocrisy primarily as a matter of pretense, of the difference between the inner morality and outward perform…

Read More

Debt Peonage Update: Making Home Unaffordable

…l I wrote a longer commentary here on Tom Geoghegan’s apt observation that today’s bankers aren’t like the bankers of old who actually wanted to see loans repaid. Peter Goodman’s report today confirms yet again that we are in a bold new era of usury that no amount of windowdressing can fully conceal. The business pages this week have been filled with silly stories on tiny signs of life in the housing market, whereas the big story—the millions of d…

Read More

Pious White Reformers and Race, Then and Now

…Jedidiah Morse, Jeremiah Evarts, Robert Finley, and Isaac McCoy. We speak today of the fecklessness of white liberals, and I certainly am among those who have decried, in these pages and elsewhere, the special fecklessness of white Christian progressives when it comes to the hardcore issues of race and class. The difference between today’s progressives and the “benevolent” reformers of 200 years ago is that those pious reformers actually had the…

Read More

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

…, should mean that no declaration of a ‘coming to Jesus’ moment on race by today’s conservatives should be taken at face value. The political survival of the pro-enslavement camp back then required duplicity, i.e, paying lip service to non-racialism and the enfranchisement of Black people while plotting their harm and repression just as the political survival of today’s conservatives requires plausible deniability regarding their racist remarks an…

Read More

In Speech to White Evangelical Broadcasters, Trump Lays Out his White Christian Nationalist Vision

…’re very sick people, in my opinion. In many cases, they’re sick. I’m here today because I know that to achieve victory in this fight, just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord and the grace of Almighty God. We have to have that. “Persecuted Christians.” Trump praises the convicted felons who have been incarcerated because of their participation in the violent insurrection he himself incited on January 6, 2021, calli…

Read More