Religion Dispatches
…forthcoming with the Senate. At a special Mass held for Lozada on February 17 and attended by some five thousand people at De La Salle University, Lozada was flanked by Catholic bishops and priests on stage along with former president Corazon Aquino, all of whom expressed their praise for, and support of, Lozada and asked the congregation to pray for him. On February 18, Ateneo de Manila, my host university and a Jesuit institution, held a specia…
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…at led me to research and write about the White supremacy movement. Between 1985 and 1994, I was the research director at the Center for Democratic Renewal (formerly the National Anti-Klan Network). Why did you decide to write Blood and Politics? It became apparent to me that much of the received wisdom about White supremacists was simply wrong. And I wanted to write a book that did not just say what I thought was correct, but I wanted to show it…
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…ion was of a faith-based movement that required not just a political but a spiritual response. My hope is that religious progressives who seek to build upon the social gospel’s legacy will stay focused on that spiritual heritage. Defining what makes religious progressives religious progressives might prove more vital to their future cause than current ideological food fights between “priests” and “prophets.” Rauschenbusch concluded his classic boo…
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…survey subjects to sign onto. Neither are Thompson’s terms—“atheist” and “spiritual”—contradictory. “Spiritual,” an impossible-to-define term, does not require belief in God, although it can also describe a level of devotion within a religious tradition. Questions like these focus on “belief.” The recent Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) “Census of American Religion” focuses largely on “affiliation.” But both “belief” and “affiliation” ar…
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…lical university in the world), where students are taught that the earth is 10,000 years old. Millions of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a real debate when it comes to human origins. They also come to learn that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice that can be repaired with prayer. They are taught that secular historians are suppressing the vision of the Founding Fathers and that America was supposed to be a Christian nation…
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…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…
Read More…other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Being loosed” could happen because the husband left because the wife was at church too much, they divorced, or the husband died. Others were in horrible marriages, often with physical and emotional abuse involved. Some never married. Yet the chu…
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…sm in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 12-16. I should add, however, that to their credit, the authors of the Pearson text do note that Christians’ brutal treatment of Muslims and Jews during the Crusades (6.8, Text 3: 3), a point sometimes omitted in other textbooks. 9 Cengage-National Geographic, World Cultures and Geography: Texas, R52. 10 Ibid., R53. 11 Quoted in “P2015_NatGeogWCGResponsestoTX—110614…
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…Camelot was a “layover on the way to Vietnam.” Maybe so, maybe not. On June 10, 1963, President Kennedy delivered the commencement speech at American University. In the middle of the Cold War, he laid out his vision for a world at peace and how we might get there: “Some say it is useless to speak of peace or world disarmament, and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I bel…
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…imself, who made pragmatic compromises that were largely commendable in the 1930s but far less so in the 1950s. Still, the key point is straightforward if you want to think with the radical Niebuhr: keep your eyes on the prize, but be humble and realistic enough to embrace lesser evils. Hedges and I agree that liberal churches are internally contested and that our “good guys” do not always win. We seem to disagree over whether significant institut…
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