Religion Dispatches
…ithout problems, as my RD colleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from…
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…have always been African Americans in the Jewish community. We also have a number of artifacts from the Nation of Islam as well as other Muslim communities. So the museum reminds us there were African Muslims who were enslaved, making the Islamic experience part of the founding of America. Even though black history is dominated by the Christian voice, it is not the only voice that is present. We strive to tell the story from Islam to Judaism to Ch…
Read More…als argue that at least part of that is due to the divided field where anti-Trump voters can choose from a number of alternatives. But that interpretation only underscores the larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so f…
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…ndred years. Former industrial cities with once sizable populations of blue-collar African-American laborers were among the cities hit hardest by massive downturns in resources, as businesses and corporations relocated to better markets in the suburbs or overseas and as middle-class populations fled urban core neighborhoods for outer-ring or suburban locales. Both of these dynamics contributed to vastly diminished property values, tax revenues, an…
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…rganization regularly hosts, bringing together all kinds of people—from non-Christian LGBT people to gay Christians to conservative and liberal straight Christians and non-Christian straight people—closing with these words: “If the church is to ever have an impact [on] today’s culture it has to start by giving up its power. We don’t win anything by using power; rather we are [here] to influence with love and service.” Therefore I ask you, Mr. Perk…
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…al historian has managed to tell the story as well and as thoroughly as non-historian Kevin Phillips tells it in his magisterial 600-page tome, The Cousins Wars (1999). Phillips notes that the fiercest American revolutionaries by far were New England members of the Dissenting churches (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists) whose forebears, in the preceding century, had battled the proto-Catholic Stuarts back in the Mother Country. In the En…
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…ters, who aren’t necessarily economically struggling the same way that blue-collar voters are, the Affordable Care Act loomed large. Just over 80 percent of Trump voters said the ACC “went too far.” As Olga Khazan reported in The Atlantic, it’s upper middle-income voters who don’t qualify for premium subsidies but saw their health insurance rates rise substantially under Obamacare who are the most dissatisfied with the law. As conservative comment…
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…isunderstood this “coalition” continues to be. Vox.com’s anti-gay apologist-in-residence Brandon Ambrosino, whose supposed expertise is “culture and religion,” seems surprised to find that Catholics and Evangelicals “might be less politically aligned than is otherwise thought,” with Catholics more closely “aligned with liberal values than Evangelicals.” But these numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has bothered to looked at Catholic…
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…Family Radio Billboards: “He is Coming Again! May 21, 2011.” Or the tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker: Jesus is Coming, Look Busy. During the last week of January 2015, police in Utah concluded their investigation of the September deaths the Strack family in Springville, Utah. An older son of Kristi Strack found his mother, along with Benjamin Strack and the couple’s three children, all dead. The announcement concluded that the parents’ deaths were…
Read More…in 1986. Their first major hit, “I Useta Love Her” (1989) is still the all-time biggest-selling single in Irish history. It topped the charts for nine weeks. The lyrics reminisce about a former object of the singer’s affection, whom he courted in church as she sashayed up the aisle to take Holy Communion: I useta see her up the chapel when she went to Sunday mass And when she’d go to receive, I’d kneel down there And watch her pass— The glory of…
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