Category: Religion

The GOP’s Unasked ‘Religious’ Questions

In the Republican race, the hottest “religious issue” is the Mormonism of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, which many commentators have ruled out of bounds. But there are broader issues of religion and politics that should be part of the…

Smearing Israel’s ‘Peace Now’ Movement

Patriotism was once famously called “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” but it’s also used to discredit citizens who dare question their own country’s wrongheaded policies, as is now the case for Israelis who advocate for a fair peace with the…

Hunting Witches in the ‘War on Terror’

America’s decade-long hysteria since 9/11 has taken on some characteristics of the European witch hunts of 500 years ago, with incineration of targets after a sham “due process,” albeit now with Hellfire missiles from the air not stake-burnings on the ground,…

Unmasking October Surprise ‘Debunker’

Special Report: The fake “debunking” of the 1980 October Surprise case in the early 1990s was driven by a few “journalists,” including Steven Emerson, who has been identified in a recent report as a “misinformation expert” spreading anti-Muslim propaganda, reports…

Explaining Wayward Christianity

The core crisis of Christianity is how could a religion based on the teachings of Jesus, who called for peace through love and generosity to the poor and who disdained the rich have grown so tolerant of war, greed and…

Vatican Decries Financial Excesses

The Christian Right talks about applying Biblical tenets to political issues, but ignores the most central of Jesus’s teachings standing with the poor, opposing financial elites and abhoring violence. The Vatican has now issued a reminder of those principles, as Daniel C.…

Toward a Non-Violent Revolution

Like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, the French Revolution began as a rejection of an unjust system where the few were obscenely rich and the many had little money or power. Where it went off-track was in its…

Temptations of Greed and Empire

With the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, a question before Americans is how the late civil rights leader would have responded to the nation’s recent decades of greed, war and decline. Rev. Howard Bess poses the same question as to how ancient Israelites…

Moving Beyond War

The longstanding Israel-Palestine conflict engenders strong feelings on both sides, with the Palestinians citing decades of oppression and the Israelis recalling a long history of abuse and genocide. But Winslow Myers suggests that the principles of Gandhi offer hope.

US Military Takes Lead on Anti-Gay Bias

Curiously, it has often fallen to the U.S. military to take the lead in changing the society’s patterns of discrimination, even as churches sometimes lag. After World War II, the military took up the fight against racial bias. Today, the target…