Religion Dispatches
…ed up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And it was white Catholics who were overwhelmingly in favor of Trump—60 percent versus 37 percent for Clinton, a stunning gap of 23 points. While Clinton did win Hispanic Catholics by a similar wide margin…
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…e mandate and who fostered outrage over the supposed violation of religious freedom that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s a case where the numbers matter, but many people don’t seem to pay all that much attention to them….
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…Roman Empire. It can be a source of hope for the oppressed, as it was in apartheid Africa; a critique of imperialism and commercialism; a call to remember the impact that class and gender can and does have on power dynamics. The book is more than a Doomsday Clock. Likewise, “that zombie crap you teach,” as one relative not-so-gently expressed his opinion of my course, matters. It matters because examining the monsters we fantasize about (zombies…
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…interns as spies; Kenneth Timmerman, a conservative writer and activist; Pamela Geller, the blogger who spurred much of the anti-Park51 fervor; and Robert Spencer, who runs the website Jihad Watch; and Steve Emerson, whose profits from a cottage industry of peddling fear of Islam were exposed last month by the Tennessean’s religion reporter Bob Smietana. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of honest reporters toss it into the garbage can,” said Khan…
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…tical calendar. These include Wrock 4 Equality in October 2009, where the HPA campaigned for LGBT rights in Maine. Still other campaigns are driven by current events. The biggest of these to date was the Helping Haiti Heal campaign, during which the HPA along with other fan groups, raised $123,000 in just two weeks for medical supplies for their NGO partner, Partners In Health, in the wake of the January, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The HPA also run…
Read More…d Perez-Trugila indicate that sex abuse scandals cost the church money and participation, but not necessarily faith. For many Millennials and members of Generation X, who make up the largest percentage of the religiously unaffiliated, the sex abuse scandal may or may not be as much of an issue as it was to their parents and grandparents. Christian Smith, who is co-Principal Investigator of the multi-year National Study of Youth and Religion at Not…
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…g to identify potentially radical organizations and individuals. The Green Number, or Numéro Vert, is a private telephone hotline in France where family and friends can report someone they fear may become radicalized. And in the U.K., Prevent is a program that essentially creates ‘trigger warnings’ for teachers and institutions to report the potential for radicalization. I do not mean to condemn or even criticize these programs, merely to point ou…
Read More…boys. In all, the Saw Doctors have produced seven studio albums and thirty number one singles. Music critics have compared the band’s effect to that of the Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen because of their ability to make the small negotiations and crises of everyday life seem so politically urgent, and to do so in catchy melodies and upbeat rhythms. But the real secret to Docs’ success lies in their devoted cult following among Irish, British,…
Read More…olleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A. Smith…
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