Religion Dispatches
…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…
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…riting in The Atlantic, PRRI’s Robert Jones gets at the truth behind these numbers: “there is more support for official Roman Catholic Church positions among white evangelical Protestants than among Catholics.” But, as he notes, this isn’t a new trend; it’s the result of a two-decade long effort to cultivate “a new evangelical flock to compensate for the loss of lay Catholic support on cultural issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.” The real…
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…is no more than a platitude. Pick your apocalypse: zombie apocalypse, any number of post-apocalyptic worlds that crowd our television screens, movie theaters, and book stores, or, perhaps more traditionally, the apocalypse associated with the Second Coming. Think of the 2011 Family Radio Billboards: “He is Coming Again! May 21, 2011.” Or the tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker: Jesus is Coming, Look Busy. During the last week of January 2015, police i…
Read More…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 primaries.) Iraq war vete…
Read More…She feels examined by their eyes Is she right or is she wrong? She’s got a number in her pocket And one change of clothes Her innocence is fading Like last years winter snow’s Light a candle in the window So she can see it from the road With all the loving in your heart Welcome her back home. The Docs’ keening for a fallen innocent seems all too prescient, given the recent negotiations over revelations of priestly sexual abuse of both girls and bo…
Read More…approached then-Speaker Newt Gingrich about obtaining a room for the small number of Muslim staffers to hold Friday prayers. Gingrinch granted that request, and the tradition continued through the tenures of Speakers Dennis Hastert, also a Republican, and Nancy Pelosi. Over the years, the number of people attending grew, eventually leading to the creation of the CMSA around 2007, when Khan has already left Hill service and was working in the Bush…
Read More…te hearts and minds, and moving people out of the pews across America. The number of nones (people with no religious preference) is on the rise, with over 20% of all Americans claiming this status, and many point to the increased politicization of religion as the cause. This trend of legal victories will, in the long run, very likely create a more secular America. Recent data indicate that this process is already clearly under way. A poll just rel…
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…e of the classroom. The San Francisco archdiocese eventually dropped the effort, but reclassifying theology faculty and graduate students in this manner means not only that they’ll be blocked from unionizing, but that they could also face greater moralistic scrutiny. Against God In spite of the ongoing problems at many Catholic college in efforts towards adjunct rights, there are some signs of positive change. Fordham president Joseph McShane issu…
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…1970s, Tim LaHaye in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then, you have growing numbers of self-proclaimed evangelicals completely rejecting the apocalypticism that had for so long given their movement its distinctive identity. The story of postwar evangelicals is this tension between the more respectable, more careful, more savvy, leaders and those who preached a radical populist apocalypticism that harkened back to the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. And ye…
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…more magical place, and let your voice be heard! The HPA organizes their efforts into campaigns designed to revolve around important cultural and political events. Their initial efforts were focused on raising awareness of genocide in Darfur. Since then, other campaigns have been dictated by the US political calendar. These include Wrock 4 Equality in October 2009, where the HPA campaigned for LGBT rights in Maine. Still other campaigns are driven…
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