Religion Dispatches
…depict a black man as Jesus; and, finally, this is not the first piece of American art by a white individual that portrays an African American figure as God’s son. Depictions of Obama as a messianic figure are nothing new. Since his emergence at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama has become an icon of salvation. One statue had him in a robe, with a neon halo around his head; another had him riding a donkey just as Jesus had done f…
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…ately followed by a divine order for self-mutilation. Bullard’s rewrite of American history is meant to suggest that to truly be an American, one must be the “right” kind of conservative Christian. Everyone else can and should then be legally treated as second class. Conservative White Christian privilege is the true goal of bills like this. That’s all Christian nationalism is: a waning minority desperately seeking to maintain its status, power, a…
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…labor practices and avoidance of undue cruelty to animals. Thus among many American Jews there is an ongoing reevaluation of the very meaning of “kosher food” led by Rabbis of the Conservative Movement who were pioneers in this endeavor. Conservative Rabbi Morris Allen organized the Heksher Tzedek movement, which certifies that the practices of kosher food businesses are ethically conducted—including the ethical treatment of animals. Sadly, no suc…
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…ent, the banks looted the nation’s wealth while destroying countless small businesses and brought the whole economy to its knees in a covert, clean manner, rather like organised crime… These kids would have to riot and steal every night for a year to run up a bill equivalent to the value of non-paid tax big business has ‘avoided’ out of the economy this year alone. They may not articulate their grievances like the politicians that condemn them but…
Read More…and the co-author of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” Douthat believes that “Conservatives are going to have to head into a long series of ideological fights within the party.” And the Party should recognize “that social conservatism, broadly understood, should be the bedrock of conservatism in America.” “Broadly speaking,” said Douthat, “the challenge for the Republican Party is not to jett…
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…the intention of the practitioner. You go to Google and more than half the class is practicing mindfulness in order to become more successful. Is that a problem? I would say it’s not. I think the practice is so powerful that regardless of original intention, if you do the practice right you get the same outcome, the good outcome. In that corporate setting, the objective of mindfulness programs aligns with the students’ intentions—in other words, g…
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…rate the Eucharist. But that theology would put the Roman officials out of business. In 2002, seven women were ordained on the Danube (to avoid the jurisdiction of a German or Austrian bishop) by a bishop whose own episcopal status as “valid but illicit” was enough for the women to claim to be in apostolic succession. Two of those women were eventually ordained as bishops by still-unnamed male bishops. The women bishops have gone on to ordain doze…
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…ivists for progressive causes need a movement “organized across religious, class, gender, ethnic, and generational lines without trying to pretend that citizens can leave their faiths entirely behind them when they enter public life.” In other words, rather than demand total theological compatibility as a precondition for cooperation, potential political allies should focus on their common problems. Winning theological fights may not be the best u…
Read More…upreme Court ruled that creation science was a religious notion and had no business in public school science class. So, realizing that Pandas’ marketability had just taken a nose dive right into the toilet, FTE editors quickly went through the manuscript with a search-and-replace word processor option, taking out “creation science” and replacing it with “intelligent design”. Really. That’s all they did. But when the Kitzmiller legal team went thro…
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…he information, turned his report into a book, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. Some social scientists, especially Mark S. Hamm, now argue that Timothy McVeigh had moved past the Patriot and armed militia movements into an underground neo-Nazi cell. His friend and business partner Terry Nichols had stayed aligned with the militias, and apparently thought McVeigh was going to bomb the building at night…
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