Quote of the day & religious pandering

This pandering, this compromising nexus between religiosity and cultural currency, has leaked into all our discourses. It's no surprise that "faith" has been ascendant these last several years ...

It's not an ahistorical accident that we more often look to a "higher power" to help cope with feelings of powerlessness: our society contains no shortage of irrational darkness; our current government represents the economic interests of a very few and seems moreover committed to hegemony over other religions and cultures; lobbying dollars decide more and more of our foreign and domestic policies, rendering "one person, one vote," increasingly obsolete.

From "Trafficking in the Radiant: The Spiritualization of American Poetry" by Ira Sadoff. Apparently first appeared in The American Poetry Review Jul/Aug 2005 issue, but I came across it here.


Quote #2:

The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

...These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

From Kevin Phillips in WaPo editorial on 4/2/06 entitled "How the GOP Became God's Own Party".