Religion Dispatches
An old friend expressed confusion last night after reading the new Pew Research Poll focusing on white evangelicals. “Where’s the surprise?” he asked. There is no surprise. Not much, anyway. What we have here is a case of Lucy managing to pull the football out from under poor old Charlie Brown, again. We go through this every four years: there’s a flurry of articles wondering Is This The End Of The Religious Right?, pointing to the emergence of a…
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…ly than they’d been accustomed to doing. Scholars argue whether or not the New Deal helped or hindered the nation’s recovery, and if it fundamentally altered or safeguarded capitalism, yet its influence on American values and identity shaped successive generations. Alongside older notions of self-help and limited government, the New Deal fostered acceptance of a strong centralized state actively involved with its citizens’ material well-being. The…
Read More…civil unions. These developments please a lot of people; the press gets a new narrative and the Democrats eye a widening pool of potential evangelical voters. Two recent books, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right by E.J. Dionne and The Party Faithful: How And Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap by Amy Sullivan, both describe a changing situation in which evangelicals and other serious religious people will not au…
Read More…ell as the appeal to “remove the veil from their hearts.” According to the New York Times, the new prayer may be translated as follows: “Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men.” The prayer also expresses hope that “all Israel may be saved.” What many may not realize is that both the old and the new Good Friday prayers are citing the apostle Paul. The re…
Read More…thinks creationism should be taught in the public schools. As part of the new project, AIG and Ark Encounter also say they are seeking tax breaks from the state, an announcement which has raised the eyebrows of constitutional watchdogs. According to the Courier-Journal: Gov. Beshear spokeswoman Kerri Richardson declined to answer questions Tuesday about possible incentives for the project. The developers are seeking incentives under the Kentucky…
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…made us realize Muslims could also benefit from genuine suspense and good news about their own religious leadership. Ever since secular Turkish general Mustafa Kemal Ataturk undid the Caliphate and ended the Ottoman Empire in 1924, the Muslim world, or at least the Sunni Muslim world, hasn’t had a Caliph; literally a ‘successor’ (to the Prophet Muhammad). That’s a long time to be alone. In light of America’s re-election of a Muslim President and…
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As I was driving to see Four Blood Moons, a new docu-drama about Biblical prophecy, an enormous storm blew in. During the film, long rumbles of thunder interrupted interviews about prophets, lunar cycles, and civilizational war. Lightning flickered in the west as we left. It’s awfully tempting to read omens into natural phenomena, isn’t it? Picture it: you’re sitting in a suburban Raleigh cinema, watching a wall-sized projection of a Texas mega-p…
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…raham (including their shared mentorship of Robert Schuller); He shows how New Thought and prosperity preaching can easily, if not logically, coexist with premillennarian ideas about imminent destruction and judgment; He writes adeptly on the interplay between 1970s economic decline and its imposition of new gender roles, as well as the emergence of the Servant Leadership concept in conservative Protestant thought and in management theory; He care…
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…to tell whether this wing of the Party will indeed establish itself as the new orthodoxy. I have my doubts. But even if they do, the victory will be a Pyrrhic one, resulting (as both Paul’s symbolic victory in the New Testament and Tertullian’s Christian self-exile did) in mass expulsions of those with variant points of view on the central articles of the faith, and those less convinced that absurdity is a strong selling point for religion, politi…
Read More…icy norms back toward faith and family values.” Speaking of U.S. policy, a New York Times commentary by Ernesto Lodoño on May 26 reviewed U.S. policy promoting the idea promulgated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that “gay rights are human rights.” When President Bill Clinton signed an executive order in 1995 barring the government from denying security clearances solely on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation, the Family Resear…
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