Religion Dispatches
…r than dating, which was derided as part of the “divorce culture:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npxjuh6UyT4 Tonight, Anna described her husband to People as “someone who had gone down a wrong path and had humbled himself before God and those whom he had offended.” This week, a recap of their television show on their blog discussed how Jim Bob and Michelle “encourage their kids to take a chaperone along on all their dates so they have someone to…
Read More
…to say that their personal religious beliefs conflict with science. Time, CNET, and LiveScience all took up this angle, and many chalked this up to hypocrisy. LiveScience’s Tia Ghose, for example, interprets Pew’s report to indicate that Americans perceive anti-science to be “a problem with those other people.” CNET’s Chris Matyszczyk attributes this to a holier-than-thou attitude that’s fundamental to human nature. If we remind ourselves that Pew…
Read More
…mpact on the environment, Eaton argues, it would also be better for the planet. This is Paleo eschatology, essentially—a vision of the world’s final destination, rendered in the language of an idyllic past. Eaton’s vision did not go over especially well with the other participants in the nutrition conference, most of whom were advocates of vegetarian diets, and most of whom seemed hesitant to suggest reducing the world population by a few billion…
Read More
…e able to use the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones and our growing network of churches to educate the new Southern Electorate—black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight, labor, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostics, atheists, atudents and their elders, environmentalists—all who want a better life for all God’s people. The South matters because it is the native home of America’s original sin. Yes, we must fight Citizens Unit…
Read More
…writes. “But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at that down there. Look at that.” Wimbledon that year was a religious experience, Wallace says, a kind of grace, an experience of another, better world. And the thing about grace is that it’s inherently good; it’s never inappropriate, even when it springs from a flawed source. For all of the probl…
Read More
…ual number of people as they have attracted—and meanwhile there has been a net loss of wealthy donors and elite allies. One might expect Hedges to approach this as a trade-off. Indeed it is a sort of tradeoff for him—“a heads you win, tails we lose” variant between selling out and abandoning ship. It is unclear how invested Hedges is in the survival of liberal institutions—but either way, it’s hard to see how his intervention is constructive. He p…
Read More
…s educational institutions, charities, media organizations, and healthcare networks, and adds that to the multibillion dollar kosher and halal foods industry and to an estimate of the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you lo…
Read More…based tools for both targeted electoral outreach as well as casting a wide net. They’ve been used by many conservative and Christian Right organizations in recent election cycles, including the American Family Association, Family Research Council, Citizen Link (the national political arm of Focus on the Family), Vision America, and Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition. Indeed, the Christian Right didn’t die in 2007 with Jerry Falwell, whose Mo…
Read More
…mptied coffers after Vietnam, the disastrous slashing of the social safety net in the 1980s, the protracted legitimation crisis in American democracy, and the failure attend to the still crippling forces of racism, inequality, and political apathy are the big stories in this America, LaHaye’s fact-fictional writing constituted a kind of archive deflecting attention from these issues, instead giving his readers and sympathizers an escape route. It…
Read More
…nt should never be in the business of sweeping up people based on their religious identity in any case, but it becomes even more problematic when we have little sense of how wide the net could be. * * * Also on The Cubit: Reading Sam Harris in the age of Trump Follow The Cubit, RD’s religion-and-science portal, @TheCubit…
Read More