Religion Dispatches
…: the candidate won’t be campaiging at this church, she just happens to be running for president. As to whether his church will invite other candidates, Beroth writes, “We trust the Holy Spirit to lead us when planning elements in our services. That is our barometer of who we ask to be a part of our services, events and outreaches.”…
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…rue, however, that some of this resentment appears to be truly populist in spirit. If so, it is unlikely to sit well with the funding structure of the organization. Obama employed the rhetoric of grassroots democracy during his campaign for the presidency, and his political apparatus is still presenting itself as a grassroots operation. Campaign workers typically refer to small-group meetings with Obama supporters as “house meetings.” Broad-based…
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…lted. The people who gathered at Reliant Stadium are not just Rick Perry’s spiritual army, raised up, as Perry and others imagine it, in the spirit of Joel 2 to sound an alarm and prepare the people for Judgment Day. They are the ground troops the religious right set out four decades ago to create, and duplicate over generations, for the ongoing culture wars. One part of that army is people like Perry himself, supported by religious right politica…
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…nity in Tennessee. There Ina May helped to start a midwifery center, and in 1977 wrote Spiritual Midwifery, for which she became well known. In her way, Ina May and her midwifery colleagues from The Farm were, like the BWHC, trying to reclaim women’s health for women. Like the BWHC, Gaskin continues to call for greater involvement of women in maternity health policy and standards of care. Yet the differences between The Farm and the Boston Women’s…
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…interest in transdisciplinary conversations. Perhaps theologians, pastors, spiritual leaders, people who are spiritually attuned to irreligious forms of creativity, will find some new ways to communicate about these things. But if science is left out of the mix, we will always be off in lala land. We need the incarnational practice of taking into account the most precise knowledge we can find, in the face of the mystery of our embodied existence….
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…key component. With greater numbers of Jews and Catholics on campus in the 1940s and 1950s, one fraternity even changed its charter to limit members to “Caucasian Christians.” Jews and Catholics challenged these discriminatory practices, but also defended their own autonomous organizations. As Schultz so nicely shows, fraternity struggles highlighted the problems of enforced integration. Jewish and Catholic students wanted the right to be a part…
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…imal sacrifice that once infused the world’s religions have fallen away. In 1987, the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye in Florida’s Dade County banned animal sacrifice after it began plans to build a church where religious rites including animal sacrifice would take place. Six years later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the city ban violated the church’s religious freedoms. It was the same year that Congress passed the Religious Freedom Resto…
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…sues. If there was any doubt about whether the aim was more political than spiritual, Jim Bob encouraged people in the crowd to run for local office, with the aim of permanently making abortion illegal. You don’t even need political experience, he said. “Being pro-life is your credential.” But across South Carolina—and indeed the country—voters attend tiny churches, Bible studies, and prayer meetings. Their collective views on the candidates are m…
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…urderous acts of terror that mark the occasion of this anniversary and the spirited resistance of those choking under the heels of our empire. Our generation must be poised for a stout pragmatism that can manage gay marriage and Muslim face-veils in the same breath. As an educator I am 100% certain that within six months 80% of my students will forget 90% of what they learn this semester. As a citizen I am sure that our society’s questions about I…
Read More…with his name written in Sharpie. Mitt is so Mormon, he has four cats named 1 Nephi, 2 Nephi, 3 Nephi and 4 Nephi. (4 Nephi is the small one.) Mitt is so Mormon that late last night he snuck out to put 5000 plastic forks in the lawn of Jon Huntsman. And after that, he heart attacked Rick Perry. Mitt is so Mormon that he’s going to rename the 101st Airborne as “The Stripling Warriors.” Mitt is so Mormon, he won’t deport illegal aliens, he’ll just d…
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