Search for "evangelical left"

Trump’s Cabinet (and Other) Picks Paint Picture of a Christian Nationalist ‘Kakistocracy’

By Annika Brockschmidt & Thomas Lecaque

…7 statements about moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem excited all kinds of evangelical fervor. Huckabee’s brand of Christian Zionism is prone to missteps and faux pas—not to mention Holocaust comparisons—but in the current environment, his most important trait is a lack of a broader vision. Nethanyahu seems pretty convinced that Trump’s win will remove whatever theoretical guardrails might have existed, and the Christian evangelical reaction to Is…

Democratic Egypt Tests a Divided Israel

By Shaul Magid

…whether it’s “good” or “bad” for the Jews. Israeli View of Democracy, from Left, Right and Further Right Obama’s “Cairo Speech” disturbed many in Israel and its supporters for numerous reasons. Chief among them was that his call for a democratic shift in the Middle East represented a position Israel had to support even as it knew, for at least two reasons, that it would not necessarily be “good for the Jews.” First, if another true democracy did e…

Heroes: Sex and the Single Superhero

By Nick Street

…entails seduction, revenge, betrayal and a blush-inducing debate over who left his semen in whom to be settled by the other gods, including Isis, their mother. More recently in the “Angels and Monsters” episode, Peter Petrelli, one of the flawed heroes at the center of Heroes, has returned from a journey into the future, where he used his empathic ability to acquire the power of Sylar, his nemesis. But Sylar’s knack for understanding how things t…

MLK’s ‘Dream’, Unrealized and Undigested

By Svend White

…ulture and even many of King’s self-proclaimed political inheritors on the Left have systematically neutered King’s legacy by treating him as exclusively concerned with race relations. This despite the fact that by the end of his life, King saw and loudly proclaimed that all types of oppression and injustice spring from the same indifference to human dignity. Far from limiting his activism to racism, he spoke out with force and profundity about a…

Mark Tooley: Be Afraid of Liberal Mainline Protestants! Be Very Afraid!

By Daniel Schultz

…Shorter Tooley: liberals! Ooga-booga!! Scary!! Edgar, it should be noted, left the NCC in 2007. He managed to keep the Council going through six years of financial crisis, and it’s not like nothing’s happened since he left. Tooley has a point in saying the NCC may be outmoded. But it’s not for the sneering reasons he offers. Rather the NCC is the victim of a larger trend. Denominational identity isn’t as important to most people as it used to be;…

Progressive Christian Arrogance Isn’t as Big a Threat as ‘Just Be Nice’

By Peter Laarman

…e line; of course there’s too much “virtue signaling” within the Religious Left; and of course anyone at all would benefit by being less angry, more willing to listen, more scrupulous in relation to one’s own motives, and more humble. But where is LaParra’s evidence for the assertion that Christian progressives have a greater tendency than Christian conservatives to attack the other side? For God’s sake, the Religious Right of the last four decade…

RD10Q: MLK and the Rhetoric of Freedom

By Gary Selby

…of on-line searches, “Martin Luther King” and “Rhetoric” have to go to the left of the colon or the book will get buried. How do you feel about the cover? I love it! In a way, the photograph of a civil rights march juxtaposed with the language about freedom and the Exodus captures the whole point of the book. Until the book came out, I wasn’t sure what it would look like. I knew it probably wouldn’t have a picture of Dr. King on the front…

Schools Should Compete for Cash, Obama Says

By Peter Laarman

Winners and losers: that’s what we’re left with in the winner-take-all society. We see evidence of this all over the place, as (for example) Steven Greenhouse reports in the New York Times on forced wage cuts as the latest employment trend. The ongoing punishment of working people—forcing wage earners with middle-class incomes back into working poverty—is taking place even as our elites treat themselves to ever-sweeter luxuries. I won’t comment o…

10 Years Later: An American Muslim Looks Back at Iraq

By Haroon Moghul

…y speaking, from northern India) is supposedly descended from an Iraqi who left Mesopotamia around 1250. In Indo-Islamic culture, among others, we have shajaras, literally (family) trees. That’s how we know. This fortunate ancestor (being Arab) spoke Arabic, so he found employment in the service of the Delhi Sultans, and the family line was from then on inseparable from Islamic law, arts and letters, and judgeships. They managed to make a decent l…

Why an Orthodox Anti-Gay Declaration is Actually Good for the Gays

By Jay Michaelson

…t a loving God could never want the tyranny of the closet, they are indeed left with few options. And once the data about ‘Reparative Therapy’ becomes better known, they will be left with only one: to follow the venerable rabbinic practice of reading texts as narrowly as possible when a broad reading harms human beings. (Compare Exod. 31:14 and Mishnah Makkot 1:10, Deut. 21:18-21 and BT Sanhedrin 71a.) There is a way forward for Orthodox rabbis co…