Religion Dispatches
…OH-16), and Tom Perriello (VA-5). In a press release about the $125,000 ad buy, FRC highlighted its campaign against Perriello, a Democrat representing a swath of central and southwest Virginia who was once considered a poster child for the Democrats’ faith outreach. After helping to launch Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Faithful America, Perriello beat Republican incumbent Virgil Goode in 2008, but is now virtually tied in the poll…
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…mericans. At the same time, bigotry comes in many forms. It is possible to buy into racially-tinged narratives of global conflict, and to target specific groups of people, without embracing the kind of white supremacy characteristic of Duke. After a close reading of Harris’ writing, we ended up arriving at a somewhat mixed conclusion. We were very critical of Harris, but we were aware of the connotations of the phrase white supremacy: To be clear,…
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…South through a variegated interpretive lens; and besides, would consumers buy into this multifaceted vision anyway? Don’t they pay to be fed Othering narratives that package a simplistic version of Dixie for convenient consumption? If ever there were a bullseye target for this kind of elitist and unhelpful framing, it would surely be Southern Gospel music. Emerging from the postbellum South, the music swelled from its roots in amateur shapenote s…
Read More…ll you want, help the least of these all you want, but nothing you do will buy you a ticket to heaven. You can do all these things and be ever so nice, but if you don’t believe Jesus died for your sins, you’re going to hell.” To those who feel that way I say this: Call those pursuing social justice in this world heretics and deface billboards if it makes you feel better about neglecting the poor and suffering. But I think that Jesus could give two…
Read More…by now you’ve heard about Focus on the Family’s $2.5 million Super Bowl ad buy for a 30-second spot about how the mother of football star Tim Tebow, facing a possibly deadly medical condition during her pregnancy, rejected her doctor’s advice to have an abortion. Pro-choice groups are calling on CBS to pull the ad because Focus on the Family is an “extremist group” and CBS’s decision to air an anti-choice ad was “outrageous.” The United Church of…
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…es who use corporate banks and credit cards, take loans we can’t pay back, buy products from and invest in tax-evading multinational corporations, and vote for jerks who put special interests before the public interest. Which is not to say those in power do not have a greater responsibility to the public good. We ourselves have [plenty] to atone for. We have our own sins for which we are culpable. On the Facebook page, you write, “is fasting and b…
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…a cruel and selfish act. To explain the motives for terrorism is often to buy into that narrative. After the Charlie Hebdo murders, for example, when George Packer argued that ideology was to blame, some of the people likeliest to agree with him were probably members of al Qaeda. Blame is more closely related to justification than we often admit. Both seek clarity. In response, we might want to acknowledge—regularly, forcefully—everything that we…
Read More…best positioned candidate to handle immigration. That’s a pretty stunning number given Moore’s very public rejections of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, and is indicative of one kind of split among these voters. But voters who will self-identify as “born again” or “evangelical” to a pollster are not a monolith. As Warren Smith argues at WORLD magazine, “watching Joel Osteen on TV doesn’t make you an evangelical.” Smith calls the evangelical supp…
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…us in here, then we’re going to have to pack our bags, get that passport, buy that ticket, and see it all with our own eyes. This may be a challenging proposition, especially amid an economic downturn, but it is our absolute obligation as the world’s sole—if teetering—superpower. If we want to be in the driver’s seat of a globalized planet, we must know where the road is. Saving the World from the United States Last week, Sarah Palin, a woman who…
Read More…his time of year, when our public discourse is torn between pro forma praise of the Prince of Peace and the reality of a last mad dash to the store to buy just one more absolutely necessary commodity? Or is it just coincidence?…
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