Religion Dispatches
Cameron is among those made-in-America anti-LGBT activists who are exporting the US culture wars, their cause clearly losing at home, to countries where their prejudices are widely accepted.
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Francis is attempting to bridge two pastoral approaches, evangelization and a preferential option for the poor, that have been at odds with each other in the Global South. But will he accomplish either?
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As Brazil’s evangelical population continues to rise a religious right has begun to consolidate power, bringing the church into the state and in some cases threatening to roll back hard won human rights advances.
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Across South Carolina—and indeed the country—voters attend tiny churches, Bible studies, and prayer meetings. Their collective views on the candidates are much more difficult to measure and assess. And while they may be consumers of Christian talk radio, or televangelism, or other religious media, they are not lock-step followers of the decisions of elites who met at a ranch in Texas, or of Jim Bob Duggar, or of anything but their own received revelation.
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Flight, like most of the other religiously-themed scripts to which Washington agrees to lend his star power, is no Kirk Cameron morality play. As in The Book of Eli, in which Washington played a post-apocalyptic loner who creates a trail of gore during a violent spiritual pursuit of the lone remaining copy of the Bible, the celluloid preaching in Flight is rated R. In addition to the early lingering shots of full-frontal and rear nudity, the film provides a steady stream of f-bombs, and from nearly start to finish it is awash in booze.
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Game Change reveals what no one else apparently has the chutzpah to say: that Sarah Palin was the opening salvo in the the dissolution and destruction of the Republican Party.
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Most insiders to this world are privy to the open secret of gospel’s deep reliance on the contributions and influence of gay men and women. But Heilbut opens wide the closet doors and peers in with the bright light of righteous outrage for the plight of the children in an increasingly homophobic religious culture, while also bringing a deeply felt sensitivity for the stories of the children and their musical sensibility. As he writes: “It is impossible to understand the story of black America without foregrounding the experiences of the gay men of gospel.”
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Today, it can be argued, a different type of prophetic witness is emerging that is perhaps as radical and countercultural as those of the 1960s, given the current polarized climate. It asks people to consider how to be good global citizens amid pluralism—a pluralism that includes fundamentalists and atheists.
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The New Apostolic Reformation has been in the news a great deal since Rick Perry first announced his prayer rally, The Response. Sarah Posner has an investigative journalist’s view of this movement, its place in religious movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, and in politics. Here she is in conversation with Anthea Butler, a scholar of American religious history.
Where Bush would sign something because anti-choice was his base, Perry actively instigates. A report from the frontlines of the kinder, gentler scorched-earth campaign against abortion and birth control in Texas.
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