Religion Dispatches
…ries under PEPFAR. For example, True Love Waits, the abstinence support model developed by American evangelicals, has become the predominant governmental HIV prevention strategy for young people in Uganda. This strategy is funded through PEPFAR and the initiative is spreading to other African countries as President Bush acknowledged in his address to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in 2007: “I thank the Southern Baptists who…
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…refront missions and street outreaches of the urban counterculture—Ted and Elizabeth Wise’s Living Room coffeehouse in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Arthur Blessitt’s His Place coffeehouse on the Sunset Strip, in Hollywood—into suburban America. The Jesus movement entered the national consciousness in 1971, when Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell opened Broadway and off-Broadway, respectively, and a pink-skinned, purple-haired Jesu…
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…essentially knighted Viktor Orbán he released a statement condemning the celebration of EuroPride in Belgrade. Then on Sunday he led a prayer service for the “sanctity of marriage and family” while thousands of Serbs, in no small part inspired by the Patriarch, took to the streets to protest the planned EuroPride events. These events and the feteing of Orbán are not unrelated. Notable throughout the week, the Patriarch routinely emphasized the id…
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…, but opposition by conservative Christian Democrats and Prime Minister Angela Merkel have to date limited legal recognition for same-sex couples for civil unions. According to Deutsche Welle, there’s a renewed push from some of Merkel’s coalition partners: Marriage equality is legal in 22 countries, including Argentina, South Africa and the United States. Germany is not one of them. But now members of the junior governing Social Democratic Party…
Read More…wouldn’t need financial regulation. (Good luck with that!) See, for Huckabee, if people were moral, then there wouldn’t be juvenile delinquency and we wouldn’t spend government money on programs for juvenile delinquents. It’s a common refrain on the right now — especially as the religious right — that economic prosperity flows from everyone falling in lock-step with their “Judeo-Christian values.” …
Read More…ues with the tea party movement. That’s a trend, of course, rooted in the religious right’s efforts to portray constitutional rights as divinely ordained, and a government that is exceeding authority they claim was given it by God. See my dispatch from Ralph Reed’s conference last weekend. But to win over this crowd, the presidential hopefuls — and tea party king- and queenmakers like Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint — have to know how to preach it…
Read More…ation of Independence. (In another arena, today’s Mount Vernon Statement, released by conservative and religious right figures, maintains “we need a restatement of Constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”) The reason is pretty clear. The Declaration refers to a “creator,” while the Constitution contains no mention of God. So they intend…
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…give more power to the government. “It’s not questioning the president’s beliefs in Christianity. I’m talking about the belief that man should be in charge of the Earth and have dominion over it and should be good stewards of it. “I’ve repeatedly said that I believe the president is a Christian. He says he is a Christian. But I am talking about his worldview or the way he approaches problems in this country and I think they’re different than how…
Read More…es re-creates. And yet there is a substantial amount of people who choose celibacy as a religious vocation or for other reasons. Gingrich is blowing all the right notes on the religious right dog whistle here—building up his anti-abortion and anti-gay credentials—but I’m not sure I’m completely convinced. Perhaps the evidence I have is small, but I think it’s significant. In her recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show, Gingrich’s half-sister C…
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…man, there can be accidents. However, if the church remainsclosed in on itself, self-referential, it gets old. Between a church that suffers accidents in the street, and a church that’s sick because it’s self-referential, I have no doubts about preferring the former.” Roland Barthes, iconic literary theorist, observed that the Spiritual Exercises actually serve to keep the exercitant in a state of suspense, as he is an actor in a narrative “whose…
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