Religion Dispatches
…ation, apart from the first. That one is plain for all to see in the scary numbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really s…
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…nd Eve had not been actual people. It was a real breakthrough for me. I was 13 or 14. What caused my revelation? It was natural history. For some weeks I had been struggling with a timeline of the geologic past my dad had shown me. Adam and Eve were not to be found anywhere on it. And, as a pastor friend once told me: One’s theology is basically a question of what holes one can live with. So as I pondered the Adam & Eve question a kind of hole ope…
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…on is: how do you separate out this story? For example, if we’re looking at 1968, and we’re studying the Black Panthers or Black Power, we tend to assume that story is different from 1964 with the story of Rev. Martin Luther King. But we forget the religious influence that happened in both of those. For me, all of this is really meshed together in how we talk about resistance. On these most recent killings, we’re on Twitter talking about police br…
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…hristian, just like Tony Perkins. Mr. Perkins, you don’t speak for me or a number of conservative evangelicals who are worn out and sickened by the same old battle cry you believe we should join. Many ask today, why should we join one side and fight against the other? Each time it’s the same banal response: For no other reason than that we should just fall in line against what extreme public figures deem a societal evil worthy to be fought against…
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…se who preached a radical populist apocalypticism that harkened back to the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. And yet the apocalyptic never leaves. It’s still there, that’s where the polls come back. It’s now assumed by hundreds of millions of Americans that the rapture is a real thing and that Jesus is coming back. It’s a genius theology, because it allows people to look at very diverse, very troubling, very dark contemporary events and put them in a cont…
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…rmer colonies. Those who prefer a winter birthday might want to go for Dec. 15, 1791, the date on which the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the Bill of Rights. (I know: much too close to Christmas, doesn’t have a chance.) This “birthday” business matters because people who are utterly ignorant of their own history need to be slapped around a little. As well, people who seem to think that the British Empire’s response to the 1776…
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…major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And it was white Catholics who were overwhelmingly in favor of Trump—60 percent versus 37 percent for Clinton, a stunning gap of 23 points. While Clinton did win Hispanic Catholics by a similar wide margin—67 to 26—t…
Read More…ation but to make a “Passover offering.” Seven is a biblically significant number, the number of completion and perfection, and in this spring of 2007 the Praise-a-thon began on Easter Sunday, the seventh day of Passover. If you make the Passover offering, Munsey claims, God will give you seven blessings: God will dispatch an angel to lead miracles; rid you of your enemies; bless you with prosperity; heal you; give you longevity; give you an inher…
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…cases surpassing Protestant opinion in terms of “liberalness” was the early 1980s. For instance, throughout the 1970s, Catholic support for abortion rights was “slightly lower than Protestant,” according to Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center, by about seven percentage points. However, “in 1982, for the first time, support for abortions for social reasons, such as poverty, not wanting to get married or not wanting more children, was…
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…uple had killed the two youngest children. The way the eldest child died, a 14-year old boy named Benson, remains, according to the AP reports, “undetermined.” Why would Benjamin and Kristi Strack kill themselves and their children? The short answer: a “pending apocalypse.” But beyond that, no details. According to various reports, Kristi Strack had once been obsessed with Dan Lafferty, now imprisoned for his role in the murder of his sister-in-la…
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