Religion Dispatches
…and capitulation to Wall Street leading to a colossal financial crash. But today the Reagan era is enduring in stranger forms than ever. Republican leaders want to bust unions and give another tax cut to corporations and the rich, plus eliminate taxes on capital gains and inheritance. They want to privatize Social Security, turn Medicare into a voucher program, reduce Medicaid to block grants, and abolish the Affordable Care Act. They want a balan…
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…of the country (the so-called Middle Belt), attempts to partition Nigeria today would leave the Muslim majority in the country’s northern third high and dry in economic terms. It would also plunge the religiously-mixed Middle Belt into endless chaos, as much based on the tensions between farmers and herders as on religious differences. Level heads in all parts of Nigeria, Christian and Muslim, realize the essential interdependence of all the coun…
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…n slavery in the US “two hundred years ago” because there are “more slaves today than ever” in the history of the world—namely due to sex trafficking. Carson rambles for minutes, calling for institutionalization of the “criminally insane.” A panel of Christian School advocates and leaders assembles next. Barry McKeen, Administrator at Grace Christian School near Tampa, Florida, describes how NBCNews published an article about his school’s anti-LGB…
Read More…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…
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…merge with their national counterparts until 1968 and 1983, respectively. Today’s Presbyterian Church in America emerged from pro-segregation Southern Presbyterians and only recently repented of its racist roots. A key question today might involve the degree to which a Southern ethos, complete with its implicit racism, shapes American evangelicalism. This is a good and timely book. Fea is correct that evangelicals feel a sense of cultural disenfr…
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…Western-style political leaders like the Shah. We live in that world still today, and it is in this sense that we did not need the September 11 attacks to learn that a certain form of neotraditional religiosity was alive and well around the world. What happened in the new century, and what has taken up a great deal of our cultural attention in the past decade, is that certain forms of neo-traditional religion became increasingly violent, very fas…
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…be America’s best hope for religious revival?” Meanwhile, in Christianity Today David Roach is celebrating a supposed uptick in conversions achieved by evangelistic organizations that have built web resources for the purpose of deliberately playing on people’s fears of coronavirus as a means of bringing them to Jesus. Extremist organizations are also exploiting the pandemic to recruit families into the Christian Homeschooling Movement. E. Ray Moo…
Read More…ioned same-sex marriage for Christians.” In an interview with Christianity Today, World Vision’s U.S. president Richard Sterns affirmed the group’s commitment to traditional Christian values, including sexual abstinence outside of marriage, but the employment policy change means that married same-sex partners will no longer be denied employment or benefits on the basis of the gender of their spouses. Sterns argued that the decision, which the boar…
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…trines of scripture thus serve “as tools of White supremacist thought that promote the erasure of communal memory” of racial subjugation. And among the “evangelical doctrines of scripture” Dr. Parker refers to, inerrancy plays a prominent role. ‘Jim Crow patriarchy’ Patriarchy is a related arena of inerrancy’s activism, which makes sense since historians of America have long pointed out that White Supremacy was about reproducing hierarchies with w…
Read More…cess among evangelical voters. While the evangelical magazine Christianity Today recently pointed out that the majority of evangelicals aren’t supporting Trump, that doesn’t change the fact that in the Southern Bible states where Trump has won he has done so in part by capturing the largest share of evangelical voters in the state. Trump nearly doubled Cruz’s share of evangelicals in the Alabama primary, winning 43 percent to Cruz’s 22 percent. (T…
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