Religion Dispatches
…Donald Trump, it seems, is the GOP’s televangelist for 2012. In the past, Republican presidential hopefuls have kissed the rings of the nation’s most high-profile televangelists, groveling for votes from their television studios to their megachurches, the fruits of their insidious demands for their congregants’ money with a promise that God will make them rich in return. Trump, like the televangelists, is a publicity hog with an empathy problem:…
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…aints and Church doctors. I developed a bizarre fascination with the Canon Code. But mostly, writing helped me stick with being Catholic. Reading poetry by Catholics and Catholic poetry—the poems of Daniel Berrigan were both—helped the most. That Berrigan was a poet, that he worked as a poet, made all the difference. As I read tribute after tribute to Daniel Berrigan during the weekend following his death, I remembered that presentation he gave on…
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…aren’t so much sober accusations of individuals’ crimes than an insiders’ code for ‘elite liberals.’ The Satanic abuse panic of the 1980s and 90s led to the persecution and false convictions of many innocent people and caused traumatic rifts in communities. The panic involved gothic stories of bloody ceremonies conducted by community-members in black robes, including graphic claims of child and adult sexual abuse and rumors of specific “cult” loc…
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…ed to show more intellectual modesty and to acknowledge, with the previous code of Canon Law, that “the bishops, whether teaching individually or gathered in particular councils, are not endowed with infallibility” (Canon 1326). Cardinal Dulles made a crucial theological point in his Presidential address to The Catholic Theological Society of America. He said that the Second Vatican Council “implicitly taught the legitimacy and even the value of d…
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…a political conservative; to be a good political conservative, one must be Republican; being conservative, Republican, and Christian are the markers of being a good American, and so on. What Prothero does not acknowledge is that these “markers” are not hierarchically ordered, nor are they mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are the material from which complex social identities are formed. What evangelicals like Cruz illustrate is not that ev…
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…f SB 522 becomes law. The bill also highlights the fact that Texas marital code still only identifies “a man and a woman” as the two parties who may apply for a marriage license. Even for Texas Republicans, this bill is a mean-spirited (though not at all unprecedented) attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality in pursuit of accommodating a vocal minority who claim their faith trumps their neighbors’ pursuit of life, lib…
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…nt as ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43QTjFCPLtI Nike has failed to promote justice for workers for decades. In 1997 filmmaker Michael Moore lambasted Nike CEO Phil Knight in “The Big One” for allowing young teenage girls to produce Nike sneakers in Indonesian sweatshops. About a decade later social justice educators Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu travelled to Indonesia to live on Nike’s starvation wages for a month. Their documentary “Behind…
Read More…it’s unclear how the case would proceed. According to the Brazilian penal code, criminal charges for genocide can be brought against nationals but foreigners cannot be prosecuted under national law. One possible explanation for FUNAI’s approach is to generate awareness of the detrimental outlook for the agency and the indigenous communities they protect. The incident comes on the heels of growing threats to indigenous sovereignty by a new right-w…
Read MoreOne unexpected aspect of being in Tampa for the Republican National Convention is the visibility of the Church of Scientology, which is headquartered in nearby Clearwater. The drive from my hotel into downtown Tampa every day brings me by a Scientology billboard, the first I can remember seeing. And tonight, after I left a Rick Santorum rally and was heading into the secured perimeter around the convention center, someone handed me a booklet call…
Read More…the GOP nomination, he appears to have been the one anointed by his fellow Republican governors to steer the Republican Governors’ Association in an unprecedented theocratic direction. Robison revealed to Kaylor that Ohio Governor John Kasich told him Perry should be the one to do it because “the governor that had been in leadership long enough that [he] could call a prayer meeting.” Robison insisted to Kaylor that he’s not endorsing Perry. But, a…
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