Religion Dispatches
…lded 50,200 hits at last check, and YouTube contains dozens of videos that promote the October 14 prophecy and speculates on its import—one asks believers to carry their cameras today to record proof of the visitation. Equally significant, mediums channeling different extraterrestrial beings have chimed in, claiming that they have received their own confirmations of this evening’s cosmic denouement. Not all the attention appears to have been good….
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…ok suggests another story. In 2017 Shannon Nuszen, a former missionary who today works to counter Christian missionary activity in Israel, described the “gut wrenching feeling” she experienced at Evans’ Friends of Zion Museum. Geared towards a Christian Zionist audience, the museum’s exhibits featured coded appeals to missionary activity and celebrations of “deathbed evangelism,” where missionaries target lonely, vulnerable and impoverished Holoca…
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…blacks continues to shape the pervasive racism that structures our society today. As I read this brilliantly heart-breaking and challenging text, which is written in the form of a letter, it occurred to me that young women in the U.S. today (female youth of all ethnic, cultural, and racial backgrounds) need a similar book that explains through a mix of storytelling, history, and critical reflection how the misogynist religious/cultural legacies of…
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…re for all who strive for it. Never mind the Republican Party’s efforts to promote McCarthyist laws that restrict discussions of the history of racism and other supposedly “divisive concepts” in America schools; or its leadership’s denigrating characterizations of political leaders of color with whom they disagree. And who here really cares that the Republican Party has championed voter suppression and gerrymandering that disproportionately affect…
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…er the gay wedding cake case, which didn’t give bigots the weapon they got today, they were still willing to test the limits of discrimination. We saw this quite clearly in the wake of that decision when one wedding venue initially turned away an interracial couple, saying “we don’t do gay weddings or mixed race, because of our Christian race—I mean, our Christian belief.” That’s precisely what our civil rights laws were designed to protect agains…
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…of utilitarian “rent-a-collar” approach that is common in movement circles today), but rather political and economic demands that are made on the basis of a moral foundation. It will take wrenching change to transform today’s labor movement. It requires us to think about the labor movement as a moral force in society, not just an economic actor. One of the key lessons from Sea-Tac is that the elements of this new social movement union are everywhe…
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…e Republicans have condemned Trump—but they largely have no future left in today’s Republican Party. Mike Pence might be the most disliked man in the country both on the Right and the Left, no matter how often Fox News tries to make him seem beloved by everyone. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger won’t be in the next Congress because their conservatism isn’t right-wing enough for the GOP anymore, and John Bolton, apart from having no position of influe…
Read More…La Follette. Jacoby writes correctly that there is no establishment figure today who would dare to say, as Ingersoll said loudly and often, that the glory of America’s founding generation lies precisely in the fact that they consciously did not establish a Christian nation. There is no establishment figure today (Bill Maher does not count) who would dare to have huge public fun at the expense of the pious in the Ingersoll manner—and thus also make…
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…ng shows, without openly proclaiming, that this nuance is sadly lacking in today’s conversations and Supreme Court opinions. Some scholars, in an era of rising Christian Nationalism, are trying to downplay the influence of Rakove’s guides, Jefferson and Madison, on the American government’s relationship with religion in an effort to argue that America is a Christian nation. Rakove euthanizes such attempts with that award-winning prose: “It is enti…
Read More…for Trump to meet a group of about two dozen Christian pastors in New York today. According to CBN, White arranged the meeting on her own initiative, and the meeting is closed to the public. White herself is no stranger to controversy, as she was a target of the Grassley televangelist investigation (with which she refused to cooperate). Last month, speaking at a conference organized by her mentor T.D. Jakes, White defended her refusal to cooperate…
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