Religion Dispatches
…and capitulation to Wall Street leading to a colossal financial crash. But today the Reagan era is enduring in stranger forms than ever. Republican leaders want to bust unions and give another tax cut to corporations and the rich, plus eliminate taxes on capital gains and inheritance. They want to privatize Social Security, turn Medicare into a voucher program, reduce Medicaid to block grants, and abolish the Affordable Care Act. They want a balan…
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…f course, referring to the Trump administration’s policy, not to practices promoted and normalized by his own Church in the past.) But, unlike contemporary border politics, Indigenous assimilation policies have always been specifically about land dispossession. California missions were eventually secularized—and the land was given to settlers and settler institutions. And as historian Brenda Child established, boarding schools were always about fe…
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…n this issue.” I don’t think that should be as hard as it is. Christianity Today criticized your book, saying: Crafting highly personalized views of God may soothe our church-inflicted wounds, but responding to fracture within the church with personalized gods hardly seems the path toward unity. I wish he had found more hope in the examples of Christians learning, engaging in difficult conversation, and building relationships across perceived chas…
Read More…eria was Egypt’s fate, or whether something worse is around the corner. In Today’s Zaman, I argued that Pakistan might be the more operative analogy. With weapons flowing in from Qaddafi’s looted cache, plus an army that according to Wikileaks is “no longer capable of combat,” it’s unclear how said military can secure the country, regain control of the Sinai—a thousand times harder after what happened yesterday—or hold its end of the bargain up wi…
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…Apostle and Prophet Ezra Taft Benson, who continues to be read and re-read today. A tireless anti-Communist crusader and admirer of the John Birch Society, Benson’s packaging of the message parallels Skousen’s right down to the racial affronts (he claimed that the civil rights movement was a “tool of Communist deception”). And while the Church could distance itself from Skousen, it could not (and still cannot) from Benson. Moreover, Benson’s jerem…
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…gelical, a ministry aimed at helping women heal from religious patriarchy. Today Jennifer is an ordained pastor and leading evangelical feminist voice who is working to dismantle patriarchy in the church, pressing old-school leaders to back policies that advance women’s access to family planning services and advancing a conversation among women of faith who face hurdles to gender equality. The third and final thread follows LGBT students at the ul…
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…tetzer and Andrew McDonald published a write-up of a study in Christianity Today that uses data from Wheaton’s Billy Graham Center Institute (of which Stetzer is executive director) and Lifeway Research (a branch of a Southern Baptist publishing and retail juggernaut). Their analysis focuses on evangelicals’ self-described motives for voting for Trump, as if people don’t lie about their motivations in surveys such as this, and ignoring the possibi…
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…raged these efforts, cited the polls, and at times even commissioned them. Today, when media outlets talk about “evangelicals,” they almost always mean white, politically conservative, born-again Protestants, unless they specify otherwise. The problem is that theological definitions of what makes someone an evangelical vary widely—and tweaking them, Wuthnow shows us, can generate substantial changes in poll results. Nobody actually agrees on the b…
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…Western-style political leaders like the Shah. We live in that world still today, and it is in this sense that we did not need the September 11 attacks to learn that a certain form of neotraditional religiosity was alive and well around the world. What happened in the new century, and what has taken up a great deal of our cultural attention in the past decade, is that certain forms of neo-traditional religion became increasingly violent, very fas…
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…Islam propaganda they will encounter from groups like TTT. 6. Get Involved Today’s public school students need to be prepared to function effectively not only in a global society that is already religiously diverse, but also in a United States that is growing more so. Since religions continue to shape human viewpoints and motivations, students need a solid grasp of the religions of the world. One thing I learned from participating in the 2014 text…
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