Religion Dispatches
…constitutional endorsement of religion.Gainesville officials have denied a Florida church a permit for its planned Quran burning. Need a little more junk in the trunk? Skip the gym and head over to eBay where you can bid on a booty enhancement spell from a Wiccan. $8.95 and free shipping. Julia Roberts will no longer talk about religion. Thank you. Roberts said she remembered her mother’s wise words: “You’re an actor, act. Don’ at talk about polit…
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…o One We Go All. One of the more explicit of these comments, from southern Florida, reads: God Bless the WORRIORS rising up against Tyranny and Corruption in their GREAT HOMELAND of CANADA. YOU ARE LEADING THE CHARGE!!! You are giving HOPE and INSPIRATION to MANY other WORRIORS in the WORLD to follow. We pray for you and your families SUCESS for failure means END of FREEDOM for us ALL. WWG1WGA!!! GOD BLESS YOU ALL!!!” The mix of religious violence…
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…goes by Karni Ben Israel) is a member of Israel United in Christ (IUIC) in Florida. As Kestenbaum reports, Israel said he and his cousin regularly study the Bible together — and it was one passage in particular that moved Lamar. “When Deuteronomy 28 came out, it was like he was blown away, it was like — wow,” Israel said. Black Jews and Hebrew Israelites believe that they are genealogical descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel. This belief i…
Read More…government and it’s 100 percent against our Constitution.” A Gainesville, Florida church has planned a Qur’an burning for the ninth anniversary of September 11. This is what people do when the principle of freedom of religion gets in the way of their fears and prejudices: they deny that it is about religion, and they make it political. This is what anti-Catholic bigots like the Know-Nothings did in the 19th century. Since the structure of the Cat…
Read More…ve. At least in the abstract. But it’s hard to watch Mitt Romney’s leaked Florida fundraiser footage without feeling that the presidential candidate harbors a disdain bordering on contemptuousness for millions of Americans he is presumably running to serve. Conservative commentators like David Brooks and William Kristol have already taken Romney to task for skewing facts about who pays taxes—just about everyone besides the elderly and the very po…
Read More…was Lucia McBath, whose son Jordan was shot dead in a car in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2012. McBath, the subject of the riveting 2015 film The Armor of Light, described to me in an interview last year how her own faith drove her to take on political advocacy for gun control after Jordan’s death. The film documents her friendship with the Rev. Rob Schenck, the religious right activist who has taken on a solitary battle to persuade his fellow white…
Read More…spectives. When I taught at Eckerd College, a small liberal arts school in Florida, one of my 3-week courses was “Religious Approaches to Death.” I remember my freshmen students complaining that they had to visit funeral homes for their field trips, while other classes were able to enjoy the many outdoor features in Saint Petersburg, a gulf coast city famous for, among other things, averaging 361 days of sunshine per year. However, through our rea…
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…the Republican party over Trump, and…it didn’t happen. We’ll see different numbers floating around (there are as many measures of evangelicals as there are demographers), but preliminary indications are that the white evangelical vote for the GOP dipped little, if at all. https://twitter.com/robertpjones/status/1324439825907355655 Chrissy: Well, Dan, I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to publish a fair bit of media criticism over the course…
Read MoreAt Think Progress, Lee Fang highlights how Florida Congressman Dan Webster (of “Taliban Dan” fame) told a local televangelist that if the U.S. were to cut off aid to Israel, “we lose God’s hand and we’re in big time trouble.” Par for the course among Christian Zionists. Genesis 12:3 is their seminal verse, proof-texted to support anything from foreign aid to Israel to maintaining the occupation to bombing Iran. In Genesis, Christian Zionists main…
Read More…quiet, reflective protest informing the bigot-in-chief that he was not welcome to share Squirrel Hill’s grief. More generally, there was the rise of the Never Again movement, led by survivors of a mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, who offered hope that things might, even for a minute, be different. If we at Religion Dispatches have any wishes for the coming year, it’s that their efforts and the blood of the victims not be wasted. Be bett…
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