Religion Dispatches
…laimed to have received a prophecy from God that “THIS is just the warm-up party—for what you shall see in the coming days shall even make these days pale—with what I have up my sleeve.” Alec also claimed a few weeks ago that Jesus told her back in 2004 that even though “Satan has been trying to forward the end timeline of the destruction of the entire East Coast of America,” his plans could be thwarted through “enough radical prayer.” She predict…
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…ote from Tocqueville is “progress.” In Dobson’s lament about the harmful impact parents effect when they fail to spank their children, one hardly notices that he fails to talk about progress, a core principle of American society. This is because Dobson’s vision for society does not focus on progress, but on obedience, which his why he so often repeats the term “God-fearing” as an ideal. Belief in God and progress should not be at odds with each ot…
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…lf of the twentieth century is the scholarly and intellectual level of the participants, and the serious content of their exchanges. Among the elder Gandhi’s Jewish correspondents and conversation partners were philosophers, social activists, rabbis and professors. And Gandhi’s own erudition—a combination of his legal training, wide reading and religious sensibility—is reflected in his voluminous correspondence. (Gandhi’s collected writings run to…
Read More…P platform was “the most conservative, pro-life, and profamily platform in Republican party history… articulated with the dedicated efforts of many conservative women, standing on the shoulders of long-time conservative leaders such as Phyllis Schlafy,” saw Palin as the icing on the cake. They declared succinctly, “Conservative Women Rule.” The reason for all the excitement? Palin’s committed antiabortion politics, largely, which were expressed in…
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…meeting with opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu—the Obama and McCain campaigns both paid homage, as if to the Jewish people’s real government, in the hopes that such respect would resonate strongly back home. But the two parties maintained the polarity of their positions. Barack Obama and Joseph Biden went out of their way to explain exactly how the Republicans had worsened Israel’s security, not enhanced it. Sounding at times like he’d taken h…
Read More…r place of the courts within our system. There’s a man in my church who keeps talking about how persecuted Christians are and how the new administration will take away our religious rights. I suppose it could come to pass if the courts don’t reassert their authority as the third branch of our republic. And conservative Christians—when the voting tide eventually turns against them—will have no one to blame but themselves….
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…e reinstatements/rehabilitations stand. Now what on the world is going on? Papal Precedents We’ve seen this sort of thing from this Pope before. Two years ago, he infamously delivered a lecture at the University in Regensburg (on 12 September 2006), in which he recounted a medieval dialogue between the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and an unnamed “educated Persian.” Things got heated when the following exchange was reported (I omit the…
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…ernor Sarah Palin, as his running mate. When a CNN reporter asked a GOP campaign spokesperson about Palin’s religious beliefs, she would only say that “the Republican vice presidential candidate has ‘deep religious convictions.’” Wilson began looking into Palin’s religious background. What he found was far more interesting than the fairly run-of-the-mill Christian Zionism of someone like Hagee. Bruce, can you explain what you found when you starte…
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…2, Pat Buchanan, fresh from a spirited but unsuccessful attempt to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination away from President George H.W. Bush, addressed the GOP convention: There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. To conventiongoers, it was pure red meat; culture war politics in black and white…
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…ommunity self-sufficiency. Yet conservative ideologues associated with the Republican Party and with corporate interests have repeatedly been able to draw white religious voters into the electoral arena over hot-button social issues. It doesn’t seem to be the case that this works in reverse, however. That is, despite the best efforts of some within the Religion-Industrial Complex (see below), there is absolutely no sign that white evangelicals are…
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