In the News: Wins and Losses
A round-up of recent religion news. Continue Reading →
Tag: environmentalism
The Patient Body: Our Sick Body Politic
“The Patient Body” is a monthly column by Ann Neumann about issues at the intersection of religion and medicine. This month: Politicizing sick bodies and the body politic’s sickness. Continue Reading →
Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure
Roy Scranton on Buddhism in the Anthropocene. Continue Reading →
Santorum's Holy Sanctum
Amy Levin: I’m not sure God would be too happy with Santorum lately – I mean, it’s one thing to defend religious liberty in the name of a Christian nation, but it’s another to use petty language to reference divinely ordained scripture. Despite his claim that he was not criticizing the President’s Christianity, Santorum’s Ohio speech that claimed Obama’s agenda is based on “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible,” made serious headlines last week. Phony? I don’t think I’ve heard that verbal jab since 6th grade recess – now that’s an abomination. Continue Reading →
Santorum’s Holy Sanctum
Amy Levin: I’m not sure God would be too happy with Santorum lately – I mean, it’s one thing to defend religious liberty in the name of a Christian nation, but it’s another to use petty language to reference divinely ordained scripture. Despite his claim that he was not criticizing the President’s Christianity, Santorum’s Ohio speech that claimed Obama’s agenda is based on “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible,” made serious headlines last week. Phony? I don’t think I’ve heard that verbal jab since 6th grade recess – now that’s an abomination. Continue Reading →
Enter the Dragon: How Al Gore, the U.N., Earth First!, and an Episcopalian Bishop are All in Cahoots… with Satan
by Jack Downey
In 1964, Richard Hofstadter published a rather enduring essay in Harper’s Magazine that succeeded, if nothing else, in accomplishing what most (egomaniacal) writers only fantasize about: he coined a new phrase that had legs, and has proved a valuable addition to our intellectual lexicon.1 “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” investigated the social psychology behind the contemporary rise of the anti-intellectual “Radical Right,” and witnessed profound similarities between his allegedly secular subjects – although the distinction is not as clean as he seems to hope (especially in his treatment of anti-Catholicism) – and Christian millenarianism:
I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind…2 The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regards a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events.
Green = Death
From Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death, a new book (with a 4 disc DVD companion; look for a review by Jack Downey at The Revealer this week) that professes to expose the culture of death that is the foundation of the green movement:
The strange compulsion to societal suicide is a dogma in the Green movement, moving ever closer to the edge of a cliff. And they want people to step over the cliff to show solidarity with the new organizing principles. This madness is reminiscent of the national suicide of the amaXhosa. Like Mhlakaza, false prophets promise salvation if only we will destroy the means of maintaining our civilization. No more carbon, they say, or the world will end and blessings cease. Rather than scorning the pagan prophets a similar mass hysteria infects many professing Christian churches. Though the boat still moves forward, the ebb tide of Biblical Christianity is plain. Western Civilization has never known greater prosperity than at the present, but rejection of the Christian foundations of our prosperity is near total in many denominations. Pagans of all stripes now offer their rival views of salvation, all of which lead to death. As it says in Proverbs 8:36, “But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul: all those who hate me love death.”
Saturday Psalm
“The preaching is Baptist, long and good, about the generations springing up and being cut down like grass. The funeral director, the ‘funeralizer,’ the Gullah say, has the ‘catchers’ — Continue Reading →