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Why Do Christians Worship Greed?

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Peter Laarman - May. 21 (Opinion) - Because Americans live in a kind of perceptual bubble -- a bubble related to but not identical to financial bubbles of recent memory -- we have never seen the full extent of the devastation wrought by the "Washington consensus" on the lives of others and on the life of the planet itself. We've never seen the effects of the global sweatshop up close; we've never seen what privatized water markets look like in places like Bolivia; we've never asked whether there might be a connection between NAFTA's effects within Mexico and the urgent need of Mexicans to reach El Norte, even risking death by dehydration to get here.

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Twitter of Faith: Microblogging the Divine

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Pauline Hope Cheong - Mar. 12 (Special Report) - [C]ontemporary believers may reinvent the century-old practice of praying set prayers from the Bible, hymns, and devotionals and matching prayer rhythms with fellow believers at designated times of the day. This also brings to mind the Pentecostal religious practice of prayer chains, where lay followers are charged to pray on particular topics, during particular hours, and for the same length of time.

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Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Religion Dispatches - By Jonathan Walton - Feb. 23 (Interview) - The world of religious broadcasting cannot be reduced to an arena of hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. Nor should we reduce viewers and participants to passive, uncritical spectators; folks are not mere “suckers” trapped in a cage of Marxian false-consciousness. Black religious broadcasters convey a message of self-love, self-determination and personal transformation that many find empowering. This is not to suggest that deceit and manipulation are not part of the game. The huckster image is not completely unfounded. But we cannot deny the moral agency or critical posture of participants who turn on the television, purchase a DVD, or attend these megachurches who bring possess their own spiritual aims, interests and concerns. While researching this book I came to discover that many persons are able to “eat the fish, yet spit out the bones.”

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Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Religion Dispatches - By Sarah Posner - Dec. 15 (Special Report) - Eyes aimed upward, the loudly faithful Democrats have achieved a lot in four short years. The party launched a Faith in Action initiative and hosted, for the first time, a faith caucus at its convention. Under the leadership of then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic caucus organized a Democratic Faith Working Group, which meets regularly with religious constituencies to craft policy.

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Dispatches from the Workplace: Bishops Lead the Cry to Stop Workplace Raids

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Kim Bobo - Oct. 23 (Special Report) - On December 12, 2006, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) undertook the largest workplace raids in its history, simultaneously descending upon six different small towns in Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Iowa, and Minnesota, detaining 1,217 workers from Swift & Co. meatpacking plants. The churches and social services in these communities responded quickly and humanely by providing support for abandoned children and families and seeking legal assistance for workers. The religious community bore the brunt of the humanitarian response to the government’s commando-style foray.

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Dispatches from the Borderlands: "They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!"

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Manuel A. Vasquez - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - Despite clear differences of degree and historical context, the cases of anti-immigrant violence in South Africa and the United States demonstrate the urgency of tackling the issue of unauthorized immigration. Particularly in this climate of economic uncertainty, failure to do so only heightens the potential for destructive episodes of violence that may result in the loss of human life and tear the democratic fiber of our society. There may be those who think that anti-immigrant violence of the scale recently seen in South Africa is not possible in America. However, the widespread violence perpetrated at the end of the 19th century against Chinese immigrants as reaction to the "yellow peril" and the Zoot Suit riots in the early 1940s give us plenty of reasons not to be overly complacent.

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In Markets We Trust

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Peter Laarman - Oct. 02 (News Analysis) - While Merrill Lynch is gone forever, that big bronze bull still flares its massive horns down at Bowling Green Park, a few blocks south of Wall St. The sculptor parked his four-ton creation right in front of the New York Stock Exchange immediately following the 1987 crash. He thought the symbol of a robust market might bring needed good luck, and to this day traders will sneak by and rub the behemoth’s testicles to aid their fortunes. Just a harmless superstition, you may say. Yet the obeisance that our whole culture pays to the financial markets, to their “self-regulating” wisdom and beneficence, bespeaks a kind of mass enchantment or mass superstition. Surely there was something delusional in the huge bets that money managers were placing on financial instruments (credit default swaps, exotic derivatives) that even they and even the ratings agencies didn’t understand. Surely there is something equally delusional in the idea that covering these bad bets with taxpayer money will “fix” the problem. There is more than free market ideology in play here. I name it religiously, as market idolatry. We in the U.S. don’t just accept markets as a necessary evil or even as a neutral mechanism that accomplishes certain needed functions. No, we worship The Market, we offer our burnt offerings before the shrine of the Golden Bull, we tremble and wait for the cult’s great oracles (Buffett, Greenspan, Cramer, etc.) to stammer a few syllables...

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McCain's VP Courts Conservative Evangelicals

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Kathryn Joyce - Sep. 02 (Special Report) - From the sound of Palin's acceptance speech, it sounds as though Crouse knows her woman. In a line that evoked George W. Bush's 2000 campaign references to the "power in the blood," (referencing an old gospel hymn There is Power in the Blood [of the Lamb]) Palin declared that she would approach government with "a servant's heart." Just as Bush's stump speech was later judged a vehicle for courting the religious right in psalmic and hymnic code, Palin is delivering a very clear message to religion-savvy listeners, who hear in her call for "servant's hearts" the message of twenty years' worth of "complementarian" sermons, exhorting Christians to be "servant-leaders" and, among women, to view their highest calling in service to male leadership: willing helpmeets to their husbands', fathers' and pastors' authority. She also employed a word usage common among profamily pronatalists who encourage large families, referring to her children as "blessings" in the same way that women of the Quiverfull conviction call every pregnancy a blessing.

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Olympic Ritual and Religion, Hosted by a Religion-less State

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Lou Ruprecht - Aug. 11 (Opinion) - One of the little remarked aspects of the Modern Olympic Games is its explicit status as a religious revival. The founder, or "renovateur," of the Modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, could not have been clearer about the religious valence of his revival. Not long after he first proposed the renewal of the ancient Greek games in modern international guise, he began referring to them as the religio athletae, though he was never able to say in any simple way who the god worshiped at the altar of his revival was supposed to be.

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Organizing with Obama: Faith in Action

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Ira Chernus - Jul. 09 (News Analysis) - Tthe thought of a President John McCain makes me even more nervous. So I'm prepared to cut Obama some slack on this one. His job is to win the election. He is running far behind among whites who are regular churchgoers and say religion is important in their daily lives. He'll gain more votes with all this faith talk than he'll lose. He has to bend over backwards to prove that he is a real Christian, since some 10% of the public thinks he is Muslim and about 15% more say they don't know what religion he is...

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Spiritual McCarthyism and the Catholic Vote

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Bill Berkowitz - Jun. 30 (News Analysis) - In early April, before the Pennsylvania primary, the Obama campaign appointed a Catholic National Advisory Council--made up of elected officials, scholars, and activists and co-chaired by Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and several others--to reach out to Catholic voters. Less than a month later, Bill Donohue, the president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights--and a notorious opponent of progressive causes--called on the Obama campaign to dissolve the Council because its members were "dissenters" from the Catholic Church. Apart from this archaic-sounding claim, Donohue insisted that, "not one of the 26 former and current public policy holders who constitute the group stand with the Catholic Church on all three major issues: abortion, embryonic stem cell research and school vouchers." Several of the Council's advisory Board members responded to Donohue by pointing out that...

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A Lone Blogger vs. the McCain-Hagee Alliance

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Bruce Wilson - Jun. 02 (Special Report) - On may 15, 2008 I posted a short video on Youtube of Pastor John Hagee, assembled with the free iMovie software that came with my three-year-old MacBook [view the video at the end of this article--ed.]. In just a few days Americans began to absorb the reality that Republican presidential candidate John McCain had sought and accepted an endorsement from a religious leader who'd asserted a divine mandate for the Holocaust and claimed that Jews themselves were responsible for the tragedy, cursed by God for the ancient Hebrew worship of idols. I hardly expected the product to go "viral" and so to possibly alter the dynamics of an American presidential election.

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American Idol(atry): McCain-as-Jesus

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Brian Kaylor - Jun. 02 (Opinion) - As David Cook prepared for his victory on the latest season of "American Idol," the Republican state chairwoman of Georgia was engaged in paying reverence to a different type of American idol. In a bizarre moment in the world of mixing religion and politics, Sue Everhart compared Republican presidential candidate John McCain to Jesus and America to God...

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American Martyrdom

Sun, 25 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Gary Laderman - May. 25 (Special Report) - From the Revolutionary War, to the 'evil within' of the Civil War, to today's War on Terror, America has defined itself through identification of evil mortal enemies and by shared grief for glorified heroes who die in the battle against them...

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God TV: Televangelism 2.0

Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Sarah Posner - May. 20 (News Report) - Welcome to the world of a hip new apostolic movement sweeping the globe with claims of prophecy direct from God, supernatural revivals and healings, and a quest to mold young people for God's kingdom by enforced sexual purity, 24/7 prayer, repentance, and fasting...

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Israel at 60: Zionism's Fatal Flaw

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Ira Chernus - May. 14 (Opinion) - Perhaps the only fair way to judge any nation is by its own ideals. Israel makes that task easier for us as it was built upon explicit and well-documented ideals. While many nations have grown up organically, or even accidentally, Israel was a conscious project, a product of half a century of very intentional thinking and planning. Israel's elderly founding fathers had been Zionists since the movement's beginning. They imbibed their ideals from the movement's founders, whose ideals were set forth at great length--there is no mystery about what the Jewish state was meant to achieve and signify.

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Response to the New York Times on Islam

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Hussein Rashid - May. 14 (News Analysis) - Edward Luttwak writes in a May 12 New York Times Op-Ed that Sen. Barack Obama is an apostate from Islam and will therefore harm our relations with the Muslim-majority world. His entire piece is predicated on an ignorance of fundamental issues of Muslim legal thought and apparent misunderstanding of how people think.

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Swiftboating Obama: The Brown Blob of Black Radicalism

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Jonathan L. Walton - May. 01 (Opinion) - Obama supporters should "chill out" in the face of this swiftboating via the conflation of Obama and Wright into an undifferentiated brown blob of black radicalism broadcast together in a twenty-four hour news cycle...

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Who's Your Daddy?

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Arri Eisen - Apr. 24 (News Report) - Affordable in-home paternity tests may spark more questions than answers; What does it mean to be a father? Do we know enough about DNA to process the results over Pop-Tarts?

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Religion Dispatches

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Ayesha Mattu - Apr. 22 (Opinion) - In Islamic tradition it is considered that humans were created as khalifas (trustees) of the earth and of its animal, mineral and plant resources. As caretakers, it is said, we may utilize these resources as long as we respect the balance that must be maintained in all aspects of our lives --spiritual, physical and mental.

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In the Papal Pocket: Benedict XVI and the Press

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Mary E. Hunt - Apr. 14 (News Analysis) - When Pope Benedict XVI visits the U.S. for the first time this month the media's coverage will be obscured by smoke and solemnity...

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"Menergy": Men's Ministries and the New Masculinity

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Joseph Gelfer - Apr. 11 (News Analysis) - The Promise Keepers have gone from hugging and shedding tears to doing battle for the Christian Right...

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The Prophets of Neoliberalism

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Religion Dispatches - By Rev. Peter Laarman - Mar. 18 (Opinion) - Unless this [neoliberal] grip can finally be broken decisively, none of the things religious and secular progressives say they want to accomplish will actually be accomplished. Barack Obama's revolution of hope (should the senator actually ascend to the presidency) will be stillborn. Progressives will tear their hair out as they see all of their cherished dreams--quality and affordable universal health care, a transformed U.S. foreign policy, decisive action to slow climate change, campaign finance reform, and decent jobs and income for the lower third of the U.S. workforce--evaporate one by one under the continued baleful influence of entrenched wealth.

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McCain's Prosperity Preacher

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Religion Dispatches - By Sarah Posner - Mar. 06 (News Analysis) - In addition to his virulent anti-Catholicism and sundry bigotries, John McCain's latest endorser is a preacher of a most curious gospel...

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Radical Nun Pushes Condoms

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Religion Dispatches - By Sara Friedman - Feb. 21 (Special Report) - Told that a group of prostituted women were praying the novena to bring a lot of customers for the night, [Sister Sol] is reported to have said: Hayaan mo lnag sila. (Let them be).

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