Religion Dispatches
…one buy approved levels of coverage through the exchanges. Unless everyone participates, we can’t make it work for those at greater risk.” Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t the least bit preachy, but when he spoke people always heard and felt the underlying moral basis for his policies. Obama, a self-proclaimed convert to liberal Christianity, can’t seem to weave a moral narrative to save his life. Oh, and one more thing: This episode should be a wake-up…
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…it hasn’t come as much of a surprise that the vast majority of Christians participating in the campaign against the amendment seem to be older, more traditionally affiliated, and familiar with the same rhetorical language that’s been used for decades. One need look no further than 93-year-old Billy Graham’s endorsement of Amendment 1 to realize that the terms of this debate are firmly rooted deeply in the past. “For me, it’s heartbreaking that we…
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…us have drawn their share of criticism. “Some Christians think we are just cheap harlots and tell us so,” she says. “But to be honest, we really don’t care.” Even the television show, which begins with a warning about its potentially disturbing content, seems to favor sex over religion, the hookers over Jesus. “The parts that you will see is what [Investigation Discovery] chose to portray,” Lobért explained to The Christian Post: “There are a lot…
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…made it possible for BP to become the monstrosity it has. That’s the easy part. The hard part is considering that judgment does not end safely with BP and Obama. Transcendent judgment continues all the way down to me. I too am guilty. Why do I say this? Well, one only needs to ask why it was that Obama did not act more swiftly to reform the federal agencies responsible for regulating oil exploration. Here one returns to the recent history of susp…
Read More…s gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Americans is getting in the way…
Read More…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…
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…olten Boushie’s killer showed. Even if Mennonites thought they had found a pacifist’s paradise in the prairies, their deeds to the land came at the price of violence to Indigenous peoples who still understood the land as their own. Mennonite migration from Russia to Manitoba in the 1870s is a case study in white privilege: they received land that Indigenous peoples, specifically Métis communities, had been promised after the Riel rebellion. Métis…
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…central fact here, and one that we were never taught in school, is that unpaid or very low-paid work amounts to regression to the mean (in both senses of “mean”) in an American culture profoundly shaped by slavery. White working class anxiety and rage constitute the historic and ongoing response to this reality. White insecurity is directly tied to the unspoken fear of experiencing the coerced labor and/or bottomless misery experienced routinely…
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…e of legal and extralegal attacks. Continuing to reckon with the immediate past was considered toxic, passé, and—industrialists pointed out—bad for business. These voices calling for reunion won the day, and what followed could not be genuinely described as a painful but necessary process of truth-telling and the material righting of wrongs. Rather, a cheap reconciliation was rendered, which served—at the beginning of Jim Crow, no less—to hide our…
Read More…ly why there’s a such clean break between the bunnies-and-eggs version of Easter, and the church-service version. Merchandisers are wise to define Easter by marshmallow chicks and colorful baskets, rather than bring theology into it. But there are always exceptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. T…
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