Religion Dispatches
…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…
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…g that relationship to a community anymore. The form of this book covers a number of different genres, including commentary, exegesis, polemic, and memoir. Was there a model in mind? No, I didn’t have any model. The books about Jesus that I went to were either very, very personal and not analytic at all, or very analytic and not personal at all. I was trying to mesh those two voices. I let the stories steer me. Originally, I intended to do some ki…
Read More…uld give sanctuary to Sulma Franco, a 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who fled her home country after threats on her life.” “We’re honored to step into an ancient tradition: the tradition of churches offering sanctuary to someone seeking justice,” said the church’s reverend, Meg Barnhouse. Franco, who identifies herself as a lesbian woman, told the crowd she fled her home country in 2009 after her life was threatened for advocating in favor of LG…
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…ws when he’s voted for gay marriage, and literally led Pride parades while flying the rainbow flag. Tim Farron abstained on that one … South Africa: Paramedic faces punishment for blaming fires on gay marriage Afrikaaner Bossie Boshoff, a paramedic, is facing disciplinary action by his employer after publicly blaming recent wildfires on the Dutch Reformed Church’s decision to allow 12 same-sex couples to marry at a festival last year. “It dared go…
Read More…futations of Barton’s bogus empiricism. I’ve considered these questions a number of times recently in observing historians struggling to deal with the popularity of figures such as David Barton, who bowdlerize history but get the kind of attention few actual historians receive for their work. To What Effect? These debates go back a long way. When I was in college at a Baptist denominational school in Oklahoma, the biology professor, a man about…
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…out the cover? I think Beacon did a fantastic job in conceptualizing a number of the ideas in the book with this cover, which includes a male hand clenching a fistful of arrows. In Quiverfull, as parents seek to have a “full quiver” of children, the children become “arrows” in their parents’ arsenal, following the model of Psalm 127, “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is ful…
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…Cena hajj, each August, during which hundreds of thousands of pilgrims overflow the temple and fill the streets of Hermosa Provincia, dressed in white. There’s the outsize father figure of Samuel—just available enough to be venerated, just absent enough to be mysterious, and favoring flashy suits. The Church backs up this spectacle with genuine material support, and genuine political heft. Surrounding the temple in Hermosa Provinica are some of LL…
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…ay men in the republic. Instead of investigating and punishing those who inflicted the horrors, Mr. Kadyrov, a violent provincial boss who enjoys the blessings of Russian President Vladimir Putin, immediately went after the Moscow newspaper that brought the situation to light. Reporters have been threatened and denounced, and forced to flee Russia. … Mr. Kadyrov appears to enjoy a certain impunity. His men are suspected of carrying out the murder…
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…Rick Warren signed a statement of concern about global warming, joining a number of the new breed of evangelicals, much to the chagrin of the old guard like James Dobson. The press began to talk about the expanded agenda of the “new evangelicals,” an agenda not limited to the old shibboleths of abortion and opposition to gay marriage. The Five Non-Negotiable Issues Despite all the above, on a number of issues critical to women’s lives, he remains…
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…ncy. As historian Andrea Tone has shown in detail, Lysol was just one of a number of unregulated contraceptive products advertised in women’s magazines and in newspapers. Comstockery, in other words, endangered women by creating an environment where quackery and scammers could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a harsh cleaning product had adverse effects. A 1936 book by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M.D. called Facts and Frauds in Feminine Hygi…
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