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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…neo-Pentecostalism that erupted, incongruously, in American Catholicism in 1967 and spread like holy fire through the mainline Protestant denominations. The FBC’s charismatic orientation encouraged public displays of beatified passion and, more generally, a middle-class, white (read: toned-down) version of the exuberant call-and-response dynamic that has animated black Pentecostal churches and Southern white revival meetings for generations. On O…
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…less essential to the functioning of the church. She noted that many of the 19 percent of Vatican employees who are women are in service jobs, and that there are only two women undersecretaries. In addition, Francis recently said he had no plans to appoint women to head dicasteries, which are the governing bodies of the Vatican (although four women were appointed to the commission on sex abuse that Francis created). “What governs all of this are t…
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…otion that belongs to the Graeco-Christian tradition alone. After September 11, these views have gained more currency in influential circles as prophetic auguries of the inevitable clash between a democratic modern West and an incorrigibly “medieval” and illiberal Islamic world. Contemporary Issues in Islam Asma Afsaruddin Edinburgh University Press September 1, 2015 This entrenched view has been challenged by nuanced and theoretically more sophis…
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…pian “class warfare” fears of Tea Partiers and other Republicans? When the number of Americans living in poverty—46.2 million, according to a recent report from the Census Bureau—is at an all-time high? When more than 300,000 Christian churches dot the American landscape, the majority with declining membership and largely unused real estate or financial capital that might well be put to work in the service of that stalwart of Christian faith: neig…
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….’” —Robert Ingersoll, 1896 I connected instantly with Kate Blanchard’s May 10 piece, “Coming Out As a Heretic.” I too grew up in a Christian family, and, despite very intense Christian devotion and deep soul- and scripture-searching, I “fell away” from the faith in my early twenties. I have been “unchurched” for about six years now and have often struggled to identify my current relationship to the Christian faith. Simply identifying as an athei…
Read More…e past quarter century has been its laser-like focus on a relatively small number of interrelated issues. The religious left would need to define its agenda priorities clearly and precisely in order to earn concrete policy victories. Nor am I convinced that we should write an obituary for the religious right. As Dionne notes in Souled Out, “The end of the religious right does not signal a decline in evangelical Christianity” (p. 4). Far from it: e…
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…ey and Jan Schakowsky. The doctor said she is worried about the increasing number of restrictions on abortion states are implementing. (To get a sense how women’s access to abortion is shrinking across the country, take a look at this map assembled by the Guttmacher Institute.) Twenty-four hour waiting periods, for example, can cause a woman to miss the one day a week a clinic performs abortions, pushing the procedure off another week and making i…
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…uple had killed the two youngest children. The way the eldest child died, a 14-year old boy named Benson, remains, according to the AP reports, “undetermined.” Why would Benjamin and Kristi Strack kill themselves and their children? The short answer: a “pending apocalypse.” But beyond that, no details. According to various reports, Kristi Strack had once been obsessed with Dan Lafferty, now imprisoned for his role in the murder of his sister-in-la…
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…d under collective bargaining agreements—continued its steady rise into the 1950s and 1960s, creating something new on the face of the earth: a working class capable of enjoying a middle-class living standard. As late as 1973—also the peak year for real worker income in the United States—union density hovered at around 25% in the private sector. Today that number is just 7.4%. The bargaining power and the political clout of organized labor have be…
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