Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

As yesterday’s public letter from 400 rabbis declares, Glenn Beck’s promiscuous use of Holocaust and Nazi imagery to characterize those with whom he disagrees is disgraceful, and perhaps the recent outcry against the use of such imagery will tamp it down. But Beck’s effort to discredit George Soros by painting the financier of liberal causes…

You’ve got Rep. Peter King, who after 9/11 turned his back on his Muslim constituents, once his friends, and is now leading a GOP congressional charge against radical Islam in the American population, claiming, “We are under siege by Muslim terrorists.” You’ve got Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s grand pooh-bah of religious liberty, withdrawing…

Over at Religion Dispatches, Shalom Goldman is the latest Jewish writer to try to kill off “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Inspired by a new “Judeo-Christian Voter Guide,” he resuscitates the claim that the phrase does little more than paper over the long history of Jewish-Christian animosity, subordinating Jewish distinctiveness to ecumenical public relations. In a study…

“All men are brothers” is an assertion of our common humanity. So it seemed like a rejection of it for Alabama’s newly elected governor to restrict his own brotherhood to fellow Christians–or, more accurately, to fellow evangelicals. When you say, as Gov. Robert Bentley did, “Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as…

Billy, still the alpha.

Anent Sarah Palin’s claim of blood libel and the Washington Times‘ editorializing about an “ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers,” Michael Sean Winters astutely asks, “Why is it that conservatives have a fetish for identifying their so-called ‘persecution’ with the persecution, the real persecution, without quotation marks, of the Jews?” The answer, perhaps, is that just…

Lincoln Chafee, whose forebears moved to Rhode Island in Roger Williams’ day, made returning to the ideals of the Ocean State’s famous founder the keystone of his gubernatorial inaugural address Jan. 4. Today, I ask all Rhode Islanders to join me in boldly reaffirming Roger Williams’ vision of a “civil state,” a vibrant, diverse community…

Hell not so much! And it’s now more popular!

With her usual flair for dramatic self-victimization, Sarah Palin has taken to her Facebook page to charge her critics in the media with one of the most odious accusations in Western culture: If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re…

Pace Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman, but of course the lady’s map featured crosshairs–just another example of the recourse to firearms imagery in contemporary Republican political rhetoric. Is it accurate to trace it to Pat Buchanan’s famous “Lock and Load!” summons to (metaphorical) arms in his insurgent 1996 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination? Whatever, it’s what…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners