Religion Dispatches
Ever since my daughter and I noted in the pages of Religion Dispatches that some End Times believers consider Barack Obama a serious contender for the Antichrist, I’ve kept my antennae out for the ongoing development of this discourse. Though certain conservatives floated the idea as a trial balloon during the presidential campaign—notably in an interview with John Hagee on the Glenn Beck show—that rhetoric has seldom been heard in the public squ…
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What are Christians supposed to do with Halloween: a day which has become a cavalcade of non-Christian symbolism: ghosts, witches, black cats, and evil spells? For many, the long-standing answer was to close the curtains, turn off the porch light and stay home. But some Evangelicals have been looking for a different approach. For example, there’s “Jesus Ween,” an attempt by a Canadian pastor to offer a “Christian alternative” to Halloween. The id…
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Perhaps one of the strangest instances of fake news that proliferated in the final months of the 2016 election was the conspiracy known as “Pizzagate.” Supposedly, a D.C. restaurant housed a pedophilia ring involving members of the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. Podesta’s emails—released by WikiLeaks, and probably hacked by Russia—revealed phrases like “cheese pizza” and other code words for child se…
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In Thursday’s New York Times, Max Fisher and Amanda Taub consider three possible explanations for the President’s obstinate refusal to concede electoral defeat, asking “Is the president of the United States attempting a poorly executed self-coup to stay in power? Offering calculated bluster to save face for the cameras? Or is he genuinely deluded about the fact that he lost the election?” A fourth possibility—the president’s embrace of prosperity…
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There is a moment in the film The Promise—about the Armenian genocide—when the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire goes to meet a Turkish official to seek the release of an imprisoned American reporter. As they speak, the ambassador comments on the plight of the Armenians, who are being killed by the Ottomans. The official wonders if the ambassador’s sympathies come from his being Jewish. The ambassador responds that he is Jewish, and he is…
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Last month, author, activist and Christian leader Shane Claiborne, who self-identifies as “progressive,” was asked to clarify whether or not he was fully affirming of LGBTQ Christians. An important twitter dialogue ensued and Claiborne would later tweet an excerpt from a book, apparently invoking the common Christian platitude “we want to be known by what we are for, not by what we are against.” https://twitter.com/shaneclaiborne/status/963408143…
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Liberal viewers of Monday’s episode of The View (scroll for video) may have been surprised to hear the story of Rev. Rob Lee, a young white, minister who was recently pushed out of his pulpit for speaking out against racism. I wasn’t. If you don’t know the backstory, Lee is an indirect descendant of Robert E. Lee. He has been an outspoken advocate for racial justice, but a recent appearance on MTV’s Video Music Awards in which he introduced Susan…
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In the early ’90s, my Catholic grade school hosted a guest speaker, a member of the Pennsylvania state legislature. After giving our eighth-grade class a basic civics lesson, he opened the floor to Q&A. And, in the excruciating hour that followed, every last question consisted of some variation of, “What are you doing about abortion?” You see, my classmates and I had been so marinated in anti-abortion rhetoric that we couldn’t understand why some…
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America continues to divide and migrate toward opposing poles, one in which democratic government is a value and the other in which it’s a barrier to power. Christian nationalism, contributes to this division. The dichotomy floated across my digital timeline recently. I saw, in quick succession, a sober image of a new cabinet official taking the oath of office on the Constitution, followed immediately by a U.S. Representative ranting in a selfie-…
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After several years of teaching at a large state school, where my academic work had always focused on race, racism, and religion, I entered into the theological academy. I was making a personal decision, a vocational decision. Nearly ten years ago, I prayed: “God, make me an instrument of your peace.” God answered with a new assignment. Too often we have demanded that men and women of color teach us both about their own history and about white ra…
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