Religion Dispatches
…k titled The Change Manifesto which according to the Institute’s Faith and Freedom Newsletter, “reminds us” that despite talk by the “presidential candidates … about reducing taxes, lowering gas prices and reforming Social Security…. none of that will matter unless we first restore the rule of law and abide by the Constitution.” “We are on the cusp of a new era of progress, but we can’t sit back and hope our elected officials will carry us there….
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…70s Iraqi and Iranian Sh’ia Islam (“Three Decades of Misreporting Iran and Iraq”), which should make any reader wonder how things have not gone exponentially worse for the United States in Iraq. There is also a valuable insider look at human rights initiatives launched by Christian groups during George W. Bush’s presidency, as told by a former higher-up in the Faith Based Initiatives Office, Allen Hertzke. Amy Welborn’s chapter skillfully reminds…
Read More…worthy, not tribal affiliation, then what do we make of Iraq? According to Iraq Body Count, the rate of civilian deaths in Iraq for 2007 was about 30 people/day for the entire year. We are outraged by this rate of death over the period of less than a week, but we are unfazed by the same rate over the span of a year. Perhaps one can argue it is the concentrated violence in a traditionally peaceful area, unlike Iraq which is an active war zone. In 2…
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…ng to many voters. It’s why some voters who agree with Obama’s view on the Iraq war still trust McCain more to do the right thing in that tragic conflict. It’s why many more trust him most to be commander-in-chief and wage the war against terrorism, our modern-day substitute for the communists of the cold war era. McCain gains all that trust because of his experience, not in government, but in prison, where he seems to have sacrificed the most bas…
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…ndated that “In God We Trust” appear on U.S. currency. Neither required by free exercise, nor prohibited by establishment In the suit brought by the Freedom from Religion Foundation and several of its leaders, Judge Crabb ruled that the housing allowance exemption violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion. Crabb had reached an identical conclusion at an earlier stage of the litigation, in 2013, but she was ov…
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…are subject to evolution, too. It’s possible that natural selection has encoded different behavior patterns in men and women. These differences could show up in proclivities toward certain behaviors. I say possible with a key reservation: even if these proclivities were there, we’d probably be terribly equipped to discern them. There’s no question that male and female roles are deeply conditioned by culture, by physical differences, and by power—…
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…xtreme forms of Christian nationalism. And so the narrative that the media spins, and even some evangelicals, is to classify everybody in the same category, including yours truly.” Panelist Michael Brown said that, while they don’t deny that “abuses” and “aberrations” occur, they want to “burst the bubble of this fictitious NAR conspiracy”—by which he may be referring to the aggressive religious and political ambitions and activities described by…
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…les, Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six (Random House, 2009), he spins off the Talmudic idea of the Lamedh-Vov—that, at any moment in time, there are thirty-six saint-like souls on Earth who are anonymous (even to themselves) and link humanity to God. His new book is Virtual Words, just out from Oxford University Press, evolved from his Jargon Watch column in Wired. Though he’s received some blessing from the scientific world—a geneticis…
Read More…untry was “lost” or what taking it back would actually mean, this rhetoric spins a narrative of a fallen nation as well as a prophecy of a redeemed and perfected one. It is precisely the troubled loners—those who find nothing of value in the present order—who become the most invested in these prophecies. Scholars who study apocalyptic movements long have noted that radical political movements such as Marxism and Nazism are founded on prophecies of…
Read More…lame on the shooting on the left. Sarah has an earlier post on some of the spins Special Guest is promoting here. Today, the booking site is promoting Ted Shoebat, who says that being an atheist leads one to commit mass murder. “It’s actually very simple,” Shoebat was quoted in Special Guest’s promotion, “When God is not in your life, evil will seek to fill the void.” And who is Shoebat? As Sarah wrote in a post in August: …(He) is the son of “ex-…
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