Religion Dispatches
…ew Bible’s Book of Daniel, and out of the wealth of details in this two-and-a-half-millennia-old book, Pastor Warren has plucked one in particular as the centerpiece of his church-sanctioned diet. Daniel, one of the four kidnapped Jewish youths, “resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine,” and chose to subsist on vegetables instead, ending up as healthy as anyone in his captors’ court. So, as Time magazine recently reported, Warr…
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…tuous about U.S. Christians and their political affiliations. They might become angry that companies have such power in shaping the public’s perception of Christianity and, indeed, in shaping Christians’ own ideas about their communities’ identity and values. Perhaps the ad would act as confirmation bias, or serve to normalize slogans, tones, and political attitudes like “Let’s Go Brandon” among Christians. The whole conversation underscores the c…
Read More…everal sites run by the Catholic Church. A statement on the group’s Italian-language website declared, “Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organization spreads around the world.” The statement alluded to the burning of heretics, the repression of Galileo, the genocide of Native Americans, aiding Nazi fugitives, and the more recent…
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…abolitionist movement. She cites Melissa Ditmore, who argues in the social-justice-oriented magazine New Internationalist that “too often anti-trafficking has become anti-sex work.” Arwyn Jackson is amazed that the work she does has become so controversial. “It should be the most unifying subject of our time,” she says. But “it’s now becoming a divisive issue just because of where its being allocated or how it’s being communicated.” She and the m…
Read More…ed hateful views of other religious groups. Have you done that or has your website done that?” I’m looking at Senator Kyl’s website right now. Hmm, where’s the condemnation of Bryan Fischer, who many of the presidential hopefuls in Kyl’s party are cozying up to, and who thinks that Muslims don’t have the same constitutional rights as Christians, and that Muslims should be banned from immigrating to the U.S. or building mosques? And look, Kyl was a…
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…arties. While she’s quick to point out that she’s not a journalist, Abbott feels compelled to do what she can to observe, document, and raise awareness of the extremist, conspiratorial, and theocratic positions and related activities of certain Idaho state politicians and their supporters. When she does so, she finds that many of their constituents don’t like what they see. Indeed, evidence of more mainstream Idahoan conservative frustration with…
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…its probable cause in religion. He writes, But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government. Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the polit…
Read More…s liaison officer” for last fall’s conservative Catholic colloquium on male-female “complementarity”and was part of the launch of a new global right wing culture war group, the“Political Network for Values.” Islamic State: IGHLRC compiles reported executions The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) has published a timeline of reported executions by Islamic State militias for “morality-based crimes” in the past 12 months….
Read More…l, a theist and a professor at Fordham University, wrote a book titled Overcoming Onto-Theology that influenced me. I came to the point at the end of my pastoral career where the issue of ontology, or the “beingness” of God really didn’t matter much to me. I didn’t really care if God was a person per se—athough I’m very much interested in the sociology of religion and the way we have created God in our image. People like Alain de Botton and Ronald…
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…ization Society entailed what we now call ethnic cleansing, which the less high-minded among its founders understood full well. The Rev. Robert Finley, a Southern Presbyterian associate of Mills, made the case for Black removal in a letter to a friend in 1816:”Could they be sent back to Africa, a three-fold benefit would arise: we should be cleared of them, we should send to Africa a population partially civilized and christianized for its benefit…
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