Religion Dispatches
…esting events and developments have continued to happen all throughout the past year, such as the Department of Health and Human Services’ radical expansion of conscience clause regulations last fall, or some interesting “biblical womanhood” events, such as the True Woman Conference in Chicago. Also since completing the book, I’ve met and had more conversations with Christian women who are working to challenge some of the tenets of the Quiverfull…
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…t lives and breathes through individuals and the communities they build in particular times and places. This living, breathing religion does not stand apart from larger political struggles, but is embedded in them in complicated ways, as the above history of Hinduism and homosexuality shows. Value judgments—what we might also call morality—are not monopolized by religion. You do not have to be religious to live morally. All people are capable of m…
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…mily values” as “strong and reliable ties between generations, respect for parents, care for elders, and our grandparents’ love” and the continuation of “simply normal human values.”[10] In his New Year’s Eve speech a few weeks earlier, Putin spoke of “a true big family,” “faith of our fathers,” and “one big family” as a metaphor for “the Motherland” and its “national interests…freedom and security.”[11] Analyzing these rhetorical shifts in contex…
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…bs, and seeming more and more “American” every day. Fears were calmed when Papal Guards were never drafted into the US military, and the Popes (John XIII and Paul VI during his presidency) never took up residence on Pennsylvania Avenue. Ironically, some bishops were bothered by Kennedy’s vehement claims for the separation of church and state, especially when it meant limiting funding for parochial schools. In 1984, the candidacy of Representative…
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…e was now movement for a more nuanced, complicated, and honest assessment. Participants later referred to this period as Camelot. It was in this context that Hofmann, still an undergraduate student, created his first forgery, a transcript that Joseph Smith had supposedly copied from the gold plates themselves. Upon examination, history experts declared it the earliest holograph from the prophet, and church leaders posited it as a clear vindication…
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…the reckless language of infinity, and of faith. As I have emphasized in a number of columns over the past four months, the capitalist system hinges on the future and the long view, and it relies entirely on trust. We now live in an environment where it has become painfully clear that banks do not even trust other banks to tell them the truth about their real financial situation. And if they do not trust one another, they do not trust individual l…
Read More…arty in 2012 is going to be tested by the Tea Party’s mobilization, voter apathy, and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the prim…
Read More…ations Survey “not previously available to researchers” to track churches’ participation in service ministries and political action. His conclusions are intriguing: more churches are focusing on ministry, fewer on politics. Specifically and against the grain of the received narrative, conservative evangelicals are leading this shift: Fulton found that the most substantial decrease in political participation has occurred among white evangelical chu…
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…ht and Government Reform Committee, heard Fluke’s testimony as part of a separate panel convened by Democrats after the Committee’s chair, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), blocked her from testifying. In an attempt to turn the tables on the Democrats’ complaint that Issa’s opening panel was made up entirely of men, Hagen insisted that women like her are being silenced by Cummings. At the rally, there were men and women of all ages—some older, some with s…
Read More…on Amazon, where you can conveniently purchase this latest text in a three-pack along with his works on separation of church and state (“a myth,” of course) and the Second Amendment (wherein the founders are invoked to oppose measures such as 1993’s Brady Bill). Even a devastating rebuke from a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal, who points out that “Jefferson’s religious beliefs are central to Mr. Barton’s thesis, in the service of which straw m…
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