Religion Dispatches
…upporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy.’” Just last month, Christianity Today featured a review of Caitlin Carenen’s The Fervent Embrace, in which Wheaton College professor Gary Burge took issue with the author’s broad categorization of evangelicalism as unilaterally Zionist, noting that “It is frustrating to see ourselves summarized through the extreme voices of Jerry Falwell or Hal Lindsey—and today, Pat Robertson and John Hagee. Evangelicals…
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…girl” who was deceived by a violent and unscrupulous husband, which helped promote identification with audiences. Today, however, such profiles are supplemented by actual visuals. Images of hard-working and non-threatening gay couples with their children enhance that audience identification even further. I’m interested in your observation that religion is a “malleable tool” where marriage debates are concerned. Right now the UCC church in North Ca…
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…ch. We are the Church.” While a single example, this statement reminds us, today, on World AIDS Day 2008, that throughout its history, AIDS/HIV has been entangled with religion—for good and ill. As we move into the second quarter century of the pandemic, this entanglement continues. Twenty-first century religion has been shaped by and has shaped the AIDS/HIV crisis; they continue to shape one another. Today, we often hear about this entanglement i…
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…ization that it has been, and continues to be, primarily a political issue promoted by religious groups with a far larger agenda than simply abortion—and driven by an energy that goes far deeper into the racial history of the country than most Americans want to admit. After the Civil War in the 1860s, the white South was able to keep former black slaves from full participation in society for another 100 years. Only in the 1960s were African Americ…
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…any form of religious progressivism. Yet the original social gospel, like today’s progressives, also faced the challenge of defining its mission to the larger culture, specifically, how best to engage important political and economic interests of the time. This engagement led the movement to raise a number of questions about its mission. For example, was the social gospel’s primary objective to cast a wide ideological net to create a broad coalit…
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…s among mainline clergy extend to broader protections for LGBTQ Americans. Today, women clergy overwhelmingly (96%) favor laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing, compared with 88% of men clergy. Women clergy (86%) today are also more likely than men (64%) to oppose allowing a small business owner to refuse, on the basis of their beliefs, to provide p…
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…ow, for example, that exposure to ultraviolet radiation triggers mutations today, then we can also assume it would have had a similar influence on creatures living hundreds of millions of years ago. Meyer observes that, today, when we see something intricate and functional—such as a computer or a can opener—we assume that it’s been designed by some intelligence. Consequently, extrapolating from present observations into the past, the design of an…
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…ealed: What could top such a list? Since we’re on the subject of disasters today, we might have noted how, amid the response to Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush’s FEMA hyped Robertson’s philanthropic arm, Operation Blessing. This organization is small and unorthodox at best, and has been accused of various irregularities. Yet early in the crisis it appeared on a FEMA list of just three places to donate, alongside the Red Cross. If we compare thes…
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…ke Azerrad’s were mostly confined to relatively fringe alt-right podcasts. Today, they’ve been so mainstreamed they’re comfortable announcing them on the plenary stage. “America is a gynocracy”—male supremacy Declaring that “America today is a gynocracy,” Azerrad claims that it’s ruled, along with the rest of the West, by a “feminine spirit which is at war with almost all traditional expressions of masculinity.” Furthermore, “what the regime hates…
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…funds for poverty alleviation or affordable housing, or, as they are doing today, for an extension of unemployment insurance or a raise in the minimum wage, but they dare not question the underlying structures that create poverty or homelessness or long-term unemployment. The more they were targeted by the Right for even these liberal aspirations, the more timid and uninspiring they became. In the liberal pews there is rarely a naming of the “prin…
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