When Shrugging is Not an Option
- May/June 2025
- April 30, 2025
There was a nineteenthth-century American political party known to history as the Know Nothings. Do today’s right-wing movements, some of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, warrant a comparison with that nineteenth-century political party? To do so, we must examine just what the Know Nothing, or American Nativist, Party, whose greatest influence
READ MORECongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Those 16 words encapsulate what many modern declarations of religious liberty attempt to guarantee by a plethora of verbiage. James Madison penned those clauses, and deliberated whether to use the term conscience, but after much debate he opted for
READ MOREHow too many modern-day believers succumbed to the lure of political power and lost the essence of the Gospel Illustration by John Williams How did a democracy, whose Statue of Liberty represents a beacon of freedom to the world, find itself in a fulcrum of chaos and misdirection following a fair democratic election, judged so
READ MOREConsequential circumstances can sometimes be triggered by inconsequential events. Given the versatility of wind and weather, it might seem of little consequence that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock rather than far to the south near Virginia, but nevertheless the event has etched itself deeply into the historical consciousness of the country. The Puritan settlement
READ MOREI was 15 years of age (growing up in White-ruled and racially segregated Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) when I read in Time magazine about the Bible Belt of the southern United States. I still recall my disbelief and puzzlement. How could the “Bible Belt” be the most Christian region in the United States and also be
READ MOREATHEOCRACY is a form of government in which all the affairs of men, whether temporal or spiritual, civil or religious, are united under the control of God. The government of Israel was a true theocracy. It was really a government of God. When doing their duty, the kings of Israel ruled the people according to
READ MOREWell into the woods of a new year, we babes of the third millennium might well take note of the dried leaves already littering the landscape. Indeed, it was only a week into 2021 that a surging crowd broke down the doors of “the temple of democracy,” to use Speaker Pelosi’s term, and pillaged its
READ MOREOpinion: A Christian minister worries out loud. We live in dangerous times. It is especially dangerous if you happen to be a statue. That is because statues all over America are being torn down. In early 2020 the city of Columbus, Ohio, removed a statue of Christopher Columbus that was located in front of City
READ MOREA Book Review Redux Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980, by Rick Perlstein. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020. Alarmed at what they saw as the decay of morality in the nation, religious fundamentalists John Conlon and Bill Bright in 1976 organized a group of activist protestants, the Christian Freedom Foundation. Previously the Southern Baptist Association had
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