Category: Faiths And Their Followers
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Faith Heeling
Where we are now: Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values. But treating politics like a religion also makes it more emotionally volatile, more tribal (because differences of opinion…
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The Right Indoctrination
SCENE: Mitch BERG is at REI, getting a handlebar cell phone carrier for hjs bike. He rounds the corner from the coffee cups, and runs into Avery LIBRELLE, who is shopping for…something? BERG tries to backpedal quietly away, but it’s too late. LIBRELLE: Merg! BERG: Oh, shhhhhhhhure as I stand here today, it’s Avery… LIBRELLE:…
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I Gotta Confess…
… I had completely given up on the Catholic Church ever actually enforcing it’s doctrine with regard to most progressive causes, including abortion. So my jaw may have dropped just a little when I saw that archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, has apparently barred the speaker of the house from communion, more for wrapping…
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The Catholic vote
This piece from the NCR highlights one of the factors in the upcoming election, the Latino Catholic vote. This disconnect with immigrant voters and their values accounted in large part for the most remarkable fact about the 2020 election: Donald Trump did better among Latinos than he had done in 2016, and also among Black…
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Not Our Kind, Dear
Victor Davis Hanson, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, explains why he longer works for the magazine of William F. Buckley: I think there were certain people in the Republican movement, or establishment, who felt it is their duty to internally police their own, and that’s kind of a virtue signal to the left. We…
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Smack
Justices Alito and Gorsuch pimp-slaps the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) with a rolled-up copy of the First Amendment. FIllmore County, with the MPCA at their backs, wanted to force a group of Amish families in Fillmore County to either put in septic tanks or be evicted from their homes: Fillmore County in 2013 started…
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Church, State, And The Condition Of The Soul
It’s been a longstanding issue — how does the Catholic Church deal with politicians who are Catholic, but who actively support policies inimical to the faith? Especially now, since Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic, is in the Oval Office? The nation’s bishops are meeting this week and the matter is coming to a head: This…
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Pop Life
I’ve never much liked the entire “Seventies Midwestern Arena Rock” genre. But among the bands in that genre, it’s Styx that’s always gone beneath and below the rest, the one whose impression to me swerves from apathy into active dislike. It’s not that they couldn’t play. They certainly had live game. But unlike REO Speedwagon,…
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Duty
I’ve got a lot of Catholic friends who are also conservatives. I keep asking them – “when is your bureaucracy going to start enforcing the church’s supposed beliefs, like publicly supporting the right to life, or at least not being pro-infanticide, on “Catholic” politicians? “We will. We will”. But they don’t. Never. But is the…
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Just So We’re Clear On This…
President Biden, we’re told, is a devout Catholic, which is a good thing… …as opposed to Amy Coney Barrett, for whom it was a bad thing. Also – “Ascendant liberal Christianity is an eternal hope on Big Left. Sort of like Blue Texas. There’s anways been a “blue” church: mainline Presbyterians, white Methodists and Episcopoals,…
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Peak Minnesota
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Deplorablx
So why did Latinos vote for Trump in record numbers? Because they’re a bunch of bitter Jesus Freaks, according to the guy who made “bigger Jebus freaks” a political class and social identity group: .@BarackObama: “There’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who…the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees— undocumented workers—…
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My Checklist
My “Black Friday” checklist:Wednesday before Thanksgiving: Make sure I’ve got groceries and essentials sufficient to get through ’til Monday. Check. Anticipate the places I need to go for the next three days, and map out routes avoiding major malls, Targets, Walmarts and commercial districts. Check. Switch on NPR and start counting all the “celebrities” and…
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Subservient
These tweets have made the rounds of conservative social, cable and broadcast media. Which doesn’t mean they don’t need to be splattered far and wide. Berg’s Seventh Law is omnipresent: “Irony” – Judge Coney Barrett is already one of the nation’s most powerful jurists, even if she never gets on the SCOTUS (and here’s hoping…
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Pretty Much Any/Every Day On Twitter
THEM: “You are a Christian. You believe in an invisible man that controls everyone and everything. A flying spaghetti monster. I, on the other hand, am a creature of pure reason! I believe in an evidence-based life!” ME: “I *am* a Christian.” “And you believe that a fetus isn’t human until it is born, that…
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“Transgressive”
Brazilian “comedy” features a gay Jesus: The Brazilian comedy group Porta dos Fundos (which literally translates to “back door”) appears to have a real hang-up about our Lord and Christianity in general. Last December the group released The Last Hangover on Netflix, a movie that blends Christ’s Last Supper with his disciples and The Hangover into a night of…
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The Club
It’s no secret that Democrats like Ilhan Omar are openly anti-Semitic and actively seek to destroy Israel. President Trump says Jews who support such Democrats are betraying their own people and the nation of Israel. Paul Mirengoff, writing at Powerline, is upset the President would point this out. Trump is not a Jew. It’s “inappropriate”…
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Minnesota’s Intellectual Titan Strikes Again
Former Miss Iraq Sarah Idan lights up Rep. Ilhan Omar – and Muslim extremism: “Omar does not represent me as a Muslim, (she) does not represent millions of Muslims in the Middle East. You know like in Arab countries we call her the Muslim Brotherhood,” Idan, 29, said on the podcast The Sara Carter Show on…
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The PCUSA And The Big Sort
I’m a Christian. Beyond that, I’m pretty committed to the Presbyterian church. Part of it is that the church traditionally favors ministers who give really good sermons; my dad was a speech teacher, and “giving speaker points” is kind of the family business. More importantly, I believe the Presbyterian book of worship puts less temporal…
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The Snowiest Flake
75 years ago, thousands of Americans – teenagers or not far removed from it, mostly – waded through the surf into machine gun fire to begin liberating Europe. This is their legacy of boldness and forthright courage: Mr. Ford: the National Day of Prayer “stigmatizes” you in exactly the same way the Irish Fair “stigmatizes”…
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Sign O The Times
Back about the time I took my first carry permit training, the late great Joel Rosenberg told the story of the time in the early 2000s, during a spate of attacks on synagogues, when a very “progressive”, DFL-leaning local congregation called him and a few other prominent gun rights activists who are also of the…
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For The Media
Since Big Media can’t quite bring itself to utter the “C” word in reference to the victims of Easter’s bombings in Sri Lanka, the Bee has come up with a handy list of alternative names for all the world’s major faiths: We hope this helps.
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The Hook
Lunatic extremist kills dozens of Muslims in New Zealand (with a semiautomatic ugly black gun): Saturation coverage. Lunatic extremists kill hundreds of Christians with bombs: Dilatory coverage. If only the Columbo attackers had used AK47s…