Religion Dispatches
…nd free enquiry, these same Popes have elected to stand emphatically on the side of the moderns. This volume offers an extraordinary glimpse back on a time when it was not yet so. But it is so, now, in the Vatican Library and in the Museums, which can make them both seem very far away from a Church that is, in reality, still adjacent to them both….
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…rovide this amenity by default. Thus, when asked if it were a priority over, say, a private hot tub or an ocean view, the former may not show up at the top of the list for everyone surveyed. Or, to put it in political terms: Asking white evangelicals about abortion in 2018 might be akin to asking progressives in solidly blue districts about affirming LGBT rights in 2021. It’s hard to imagine any candidate gaining traction without baseline support…
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…eek, the well-known conservative, yet still “respectable,” German newspaper, Die Welt, escalated the mainstreaming of right-wing talking points. A number of researchers wrote an op-ed, in which they accused the ARD and ZDF, the independent, state-funded TV news stations (the German version of the BBC) of “indoctrinating” kids with “gender ideology” in order to sexualize and “re-educate” them. The article hits all the right-wing bullet points of a…
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…ther Dennis Gordon, for one, pastor of the St. Joan of Arc in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, says that “a lot of traditionalists took it that he was talking about them,” allowing himself a smile. Father Dennis Gordon Seated in his modest parish office, resplendent in a traditional black Roman cassock, Gordon worried that the remarks might make his job, and that of his order—“to be a bridge between traditionalists and the Church”—a little bit harder. Anythi…
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…churches. This newfound requirement is something the dissent argued should, in fact, be prohibited under the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. I have previously written about the facts of Trinity Lutheran, as has RD, but they warrant a brief revisiting here. A Missouri state program offered grants for a limited number of nonprofit schools and daycares to purchase rubber playground surfaces made from recycled tires. Prospective grantees were…
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…ude their counterparts in other religious traditions.) The first subsection, 107(1), allows a minister to exclude from taxable income the value of a living space that’s considered “part of his compensation,” while the second, 107(2), permits the exclusion of “the rental allowance paid to him” for a living space. This second subsection, wherein the employer provides the money rather than the space itself, is the one that Crabb found unconstitutiona…
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…ns” to Christianize the world. Also the deeply reactionary James W. Fifield, Jr., a pivotal architect of Southern California anti-union conservatism, and Kenneth Hagin, the godfather of the hugely influential Word of Faith movement. A few minor quibbles: at one point Lehmann has late 18th-century “Calvinists” pitted against “Congregationalists,” which is confusing inasmuch as it was the “New Light” Calvinists who had drifted away from the idea of…
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…RRI looks to be releasing new information on the Catholic vote on Halloween, a number which often closely tracks the final total of overall voters. It’s also a number that varies quite a bit by the racial breakdown. While Trump wins white Catholics 48-41, he gets absolutely crushed among Hispanics, 84-12. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations put us firmly in “Holy shit” territory. Even assuming a generous 50-50 split of black, Asian, and other…
Read More…nderstand their surroundings and their place in the newly created world. So, too, the renaming of Abram as Abraham (Gen. 17:1-14) expresses his new, covenantal relationship to God and marks the future trajectory of his lineage. Indeed, in many religions, choosing a name that expresses a close coherence between self-identity and religious identity and affiliation (or having one conferred) is a defining ritual feature, as in the Sikh Nam Karam cere…
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…fairness,” seeking more funds for poverty alleviation or affordable housing, or, as they are doing today, for an extension of unemployment insurance or a raise in the minimum wage, but they dare not question the underlying structures that create poverty or homelessness or long-term unemployment. The more they were targeted by the Right for even these liberal aspirations, the more timid and uninspiring they became. In the liberal pews there is rare…
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