Religion Dispatches
…nt should never be in the business of sweeping up people based on their religious identity in any case, but it becomes even more problematic when we have little sense of how wide the net could be. * * * Also on The Cubit: Reading Sam Harris in the age of Trump Follow The Cubit, RD’s religion-and-science portal, @TheCubit…
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…ts at Christians schools I mention above have been in dialogue with Safety Net, a national non-profit advocacy resource to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and allied (LGBTQ&A) students, alumni, faculty, and staff at Christian colleges, before, during and after the events unfolded in social media. As co-chair of the Board of Directors, I work with other board members advising administrators, faculty, and students at Christian univers…
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…erence earlier this year and blogged about the game on HackingChristianity.net. “And yet you keep playing—and keep reading—to make sense of things in your community.” “Controversial” and “problematic” are hardly exaggerations; sandwiched between Sunday-school standbys like David and Goliath, Mary and Joseph, and Psalm 23 are plenty of stories that aren’t often preached from the pulpit. These stories, featured on the cards of A Game for Good Christ…
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…r homes to foreclosure. Millions more carry debts that exceed their family net worth. Unemployment is rising and employers offering basic benefits like health care are shrinking. Nearly a quarter of a million jobs were lost in the United States just in October. The challenges American workers face getting and keeping good jobs will probably not be the first issues tackled by our new president and his team, given the meltdown of the banking industr…
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…r do I have delusions of grandeur about the ability of a religion professor to change the course of history. But the way I see it, any reduction in fear (at least about anything other than climate change) is a net gain for the world. Maintaining some level of equanimity, inside the classroom and out, is the best way to be present for the students we actually have, for whatever short time we have them….
Read More…ons are stalled out. As recently as 2008, Southern Baptists were declaring net declines in baptisms. What’s worse, the SBC reports membership by baptisms—meaning that if you were ever baptized in a member congregation, you are counted as a current member of the denomination. That means their vaunted strength is about as solid as Newt Gingrich’s abs. Conversely, by some measures the liberal United Church of Christ has actually gained strength in th…
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…in the deficit, will be used to further reduce public services and safety net benefits in the usual pincers-like operation. I could go on, but you already get the point: as with Obamacare repeal, what unites Trump, McConnell, and Ryan on the subject of tax “reform” amounts to a vast tissue of lies. Cruel lies, when you consider the new economic violence against the weakest and most vulnerable that they portend. What is actually at stake here is t…
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…ation seems to be growing ever more polarized along ideological lines. The net effect is roughly analogous to when campaign ads go negative: the base is kept strong and in line, but the majority of people say “to hell with the both of you, I’m staying home.” The only discernible difference between the civil declension is that one takes place on a Tuesday and the other on a Sunday. It may work often enough for political campaigns, but I can’t recom…
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…tabilize the lives of poor and working class women of color with no safety net but they will widen the multigenerational wealth gap in communities disrupted by the pandemic. Nationwide, Black and Latinx essential women workers continue to experience the brunt of pandemic shutdowns, downsizing, and lack of child care. And, as many have pointed out, SB 8’s sanction of Orwellian surveillance, vigilantism, and lawsuits against folks who assist with ab…
Read More…ficient. So too with deregulation, and with the removal of a social safety net. These things create wealth, incentivize work, and preserve individual freedom from government interference. Liberals and humanists mistakenly think human beings can be improved, and that’s why they want to use government to make things better. But government equals unfreedom, so liberals are anti-freedom. However, imposing God’s laws about who needs to obey whom—which…
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