Religion Dispatches
…children and the silence of too many white churches, Hamilton reminds us that black and brown lives matter. It reminds me that when the church refuses to speak, the Spirit will bear witness to the truth of God in the most unlikely places—because that is the Spirit’s way….
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…escribes these domestic terrorists: You heard the J6 hostages. You saw the spirit, the spirit that these people have. The spirit. You would think they wouldn’t have any spirit left, but they have tremendous spirit. What’s happened to them has probably, to that extent, never happened in our country before…. The whole thing is crazy what’s happening in our country. Let’s call these brave Americans what they really are: persecuted Christians. They’re…
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…om Calvinism and introduced dominion theology to the Christian Right in the 1980s and 1990s. Wagner and his close associates both introduced novel beliefs and practices, and revised others—steps which remain controversial and consequential to this day, such as the notion of “strategic level spiritual warfare” (see Glossary). For Wagner all of these 20th century movements are to be understood as “components of the NAR,” as he wrote in a 2012 anthol…
Read More…o be different, and they are, but down deep their roots converge. The same spirit of curiosity that animated Newton, animated Darwin. It is this spirit of inquiry that is at issue, not certain showpieces of scientific end-product. But it is unthinkable for Ham or the Discovery Institute to publicly reject “the spirit of inquiry,” so they focus — as they do so often — on externals, and wind up accepting only self-selected pieces of science. They ar…
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…f postmodern pop cultural contexts: There’s the final chorus of Foreigner’s 1984 power ballad, “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” which features the New Jersey Mass Choir. The choir’s warm, expansive harmonies take a garden-variety power ballad (“I wanna know what love is / I want you to show me… / Aaaah woah-oh-ooh”) and transform it into a secular anthem of the ever-yearning heart. There’s U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” on the 1988…
Read More…eyard denomination) and Charles Kraft, began there to hone his ideas about spiritual mapping, spiritual warfare, and power encounters. Leaving the seminary in the early 1990s to establish a ministry in Colorado Springs, Wagner began to build his empire, founding the NAR in 2001. The 21st century, for Wagner, is the beginning of the “Second Apostolic Age.” Those in the NAR believe that in order to bring about the coming of Christ, Apostles must be…
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…isagreement and dissent, and most importantly, it created an atmosphere of spiritual and social flexibility essential to meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century. The reception of the reforms was quite uneven across the country, and so we need to be careful in describing what actually occurred. Anything you had to leave out? I visited every parish I discussed in the book, beginning with my great grandparents’ ancestral villages in German…
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…isville and before the fundamentalist takeover of the seminary in the early 1990s Crescent Hill was the spiritual home for many students, staff, and distinguished professors. Today the 800-member church is a diverse community of faith including people of various races, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, and world-views. Refugees and immigrants compose roughly one-third of the congregation. The church is heavily invested in a wide array of soc…
Read More…d a storyline in which Anton LaVey–who founded the Church of Satan (CoS) in 1966–had faked his own death and was conducting human sacrifices to aid the Antichrist. CoS was rightly offended as their founder rejected all criminal activity and did not believe in Christs or antichrists. On Twitter, CoS traded barbs with American Horror Story actress Kathy Bates. CoS and TST have become bitter rivals. Unfortunately, their shared experience of being exp…
Read More…st Alexander Hinton, Brazil’s indigenous groups decreased by up to 80% from 1900 to 1957 due to “disease.” In fact, advocacy organizations such as Survival International and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs formed during the 1960s in response to this drastic depopulation and widespread violence against native groups in the Amazon. These organizations, along with FUNAI (founded in 1967), continue to advocate against over-extracti…
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