Religion Dispatches
…Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I didn’t get one, but my citizen journalist dues are current. Stay tuned….
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…orm. The problem here is that this worldview does not account for the many places where the various subgroups of this ‘party of the oppressed’ are actually in tension. An Orthodox Jewish man (marginalized by his religion) asking a woman (marginalized by her gender) to move on an airplane is a pretty good illustration of this. Another place this tension plays out is in mainline Protestant denominations with regards to same sex marriage and the ordi…
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…ery human desire and motive and act—into its divinely appointed and proper place. Legal conservatism was originally imagined as a libertarian bastion of the limited state and free markets. Since the early 1990s, however, as anti-abortion protests and violence helped spur an alliance between traditionalist Catholics and evangelical Protestants, which in turn catalyzed the Republican Party, legal conservatism has increasingly inhabited the landscape…
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Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
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…We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping, whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless in…
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…ear things we would rather not hear. Some of us are going to be tempted to buy into the vision of Glenn Beck and others who make it easy to turn away from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears with promises of cheap grace, and offer a vision of the cross of Jesus that has nothing to say to the crosses, and lynching trees, of history. But, if we do, we will be settling for the gospel of Caesar, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Perhaps…
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…better. The problem, he seemed to be saying, is with blaming in the first place. Blaming an airline is disorienting because it applies a human-oriented inference system to an entity that simply doesn’t act like a person. So if we find ourselves blaming institutions, I asked him, are we already using a set of flawed psychological mechanisms? “It’s not that we’re using flawed psychological mechanisms,” he responded. “We’re using the only psychologi…
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…about how the film is a great evangelizing opportunity. One woman reported buying more than 20 tickets for her extended family and another said she planned to return to her theater to pass out tracts. Others griped that they didn’t hear the name “Jesus” mentioned very much in the movie. More than a few expressed disappointment, but then seemed to feel the need to defend their Christian identity, affirming that while they loved the message and beli…
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…as a Master’s student at Fuller working the switchboard part-time, and the number one phone call that came through went something like this: “Can you connect me to C. Peter Wagner’s Church Growth Institute? I’d like to buy some materials.” No one was happier than I was when he retired from Fuller and moved to Colorado Springs! I felt like I worked at a catalog call-in center. Seriously. I would never have expected to be talking about Wagner in con…
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…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…
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