Religion Dispatches
…stian Center is scheduled to host a prayer evening organized by Christians United for Israel, headed up by Pastor John Hagee (yes, the one McCain had to distance himself from after a sermon surfaced in which Hagee said Hitler was a tool God used to force Jews to go to Israel). Interestingly, this tidbit was recently removed from CUFI’s web page, but The American Prospect found a cached page with the listing. Ken Silverstein and Sebastian Jones at…
Read More…rial cooperation agreements, recognizing the ordinations of ministers within the other denominations. “It’s almost like dominoes,” Adee said, “It used to be the exception, but it’s becoming the rule. The pressure is now on the United Methodists.” Currently, the United Methodist Church allows gay and lesbian ministers, but only if they are celibate and not open about their sexual orientation. “This is an ethical challenge and an invitation,” Adee s…
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…to reconnect with younger viewers, it is likely that God TV’s debut in the United States will send channel surfers in the Alecs’ direction.” Recently God TV has been broadcasting live a healing revival of the Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley, from Lakeland, Florida, which Charisma dubbed the “Lakeland Healing Outpouring.” During the revival, which has been ongoing for more than a month, Wendy Alec claimed to have received a prophecy from God that…
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…vent. He has also written extensively about anti-abortion terrorism in the United States. In 1997, Clarkson wrote Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Common Courage Press), one of the earliest books about the conservative evangelical movement which has become an integral part of the American political landscape. More recently, Clarkson, along with blogger Bruce Wilson, founded Talk2Action, an interactive blog covering…
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…is Present Darkness, a small all-American town becomes the epicenter of an international conspiracy to purchase the town’s local college. The conspiracy is opposed by the town’s fundamentalist Christians, who are the only ones who understand that the machinations that seem to join psychology professors, New Age gurus, and liberal (non-fundamentalist) ‘Christians’, are actually the work of demons operating at Satan’s behest. Like Paula White stridi…
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…ants not to use illegal fireworks in the United Arab Emirates. Even in the United States, some critics have called for the federal government to regulate fireworks, rather than exempting them from the ambit of the Clean Air Act. The EPA has refused, claiming that “Congress did not intend to require EPA to consider air-quality violations associated with such cultural traditions in regulatory determinations.” Although most people probably conjure up…
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…Texas classrooms into training grounds for “biblical law” enthusiasts. The United States has a Constitution; nothing in it declares America is a Christian nation (or, in the Texas SBOE parlance a “Judeo-Christian nation”). Barton’s claims that the Constitution in fact codifies a “Christian nation” doesn’t make it so. In contrast, though, Israel does not yet have a constitution, and the bill declaring it the “nation-state of the Jewish people”—if p…
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…re: I am an ex-evangelical). Under conditions of Christian hegemony in the United States, however, that has not been the prevailing practice—not by a long shot. If social media buzz is any indicator, there’s still a widespread tendency for liberals to dismiss Christian nationalists as “fake Christians”—a deflection that only serves to reinforce Christian supremacism by equating “Christian” with “good,” thus harming the non-religious and adherents…
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…government. Studies of late twentieth-century legislative decisions in the United States did show—unsurprisingly—that they favored the interests of the wealthy. The studies did not demonstrate, however, that these decisions threatened democracy, just that they went against public opinion on certain issues such as estate taxes and support for a minimum wage. Again: Hunh?? And not a word here about Citizens United or about the rivers of dark money t…
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…undocumented workers) approximately one out of every hundred people in the United States come from this tiny country. As a taxpayer, I am more connected to this country than I thought I was. So, I wanted to go down to El Salvador to learn how this all started. What did you discover upon your arrival? When we went to the forensics lab in El Salvador to learn about the massacres that occurred in the 1980s and early ’90s, we learned about the level o…
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