Religion Dispatches
…Radio said their math for setting the return date came from a verse in Luke 17: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” According to Camping’s prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about the flood. He said the flood happened in 4990 B.C., on what would have been May 21 in the modern calendar. God gave Noah one week of warning. Since one day equals 1…
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…e. The State Department’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons report estimates that 12.3 million people worldwide are victims of forced labor, 56 percent of which are women and girls. A smaller, but still considerable number are victims of sex trafficking—essentially, forced prostitution. With increasing frequency, reports of sex trafficking rings in major U.S. cities appear in the media. In major hubs like Houston and New York City, stories about charges…
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…es Congress created such commissions after the Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Along with being good for democracy and patriotism, a commission of this kind is the right thing to do. If the Republicans do not explicitly see themselves as God’s chosen, they act like it implicitly—in that they have decided, as a political party over a number of years, that only Republicans can rule legitimately. Th…
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…” according to Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll. The church has 12 million members worldwide, 7 million of those in the United States. More than 100 clergy came out on the eve of General Conference. On Wednesday, delegates voted 428-405 to create a commission that “will spend at least two years reviewing policy on the subject” and developing a plan to deal with sharp differences within the denomination on inclusion of LGBT people in th…
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…was not the emperor to whom Paul appealed. Nero was! Tiberius reigned from 14–37 CE. Acts of the Apostles only refers to the emperor to whom Paul appealed after his arrest in Jerusalem by the generic title “Caesar,” but the other historical figures mentioned as part of Paul’s trials (especially Porcius Festus, who governed Judea beginning around 59 CE) leave no doubt that the emperor in question is none other than Nero (r. 54–68 CE). Later ancien…
Read More…one of works, of human effort. Miracles would just muddy the holy water. In 1956, Elisabeth’s husband Jim, along with four other young men, were killed by the very Waorani people of Amazonian Ecuador to whom they had come to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ. The story of their modern day martyrdom was told in Ms. Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor, published the following year. Copious copies of the book have sold for the past half century and it…
Read More…happening, or if it is, it’s natural causes, or they’re just not sure. The numbers attributing warming to human activity rise among moderates and liberals, of course, but they’re not going to vote for Jeb anyway. There is one number Bush might want to worry about, though: 85. That’s the percent of Hispanic Catholics who think climate change is a real problem: For a guy who’s been touting his potential to draw Spanish-speaking voters into the Repub…
Read More…the height of the battling, that it was all not such a big deal, that the number of dissidents was actually quite small and that he thought his church would be better off once they were gone. Indeed, according to Wikipedia there are over 7,000 Episcopal congregations in the US with over 2 million members, though the significance of that number is unclear since, as the priest in the church where I was baptized once teased me: “when you’re baptiz…
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…much of Christian conservative anti-woke rhetoric: “The West has become a spiritual wasteland of ‘progressive’ and materialistic forces. Wokeness masquerades as authentic spiritual tradition, gutting and commodifying ancient teachings to fit its values.” Writing under the signifier “politically incorrect Dharma,” Reynolds had earlier called for an Alt-Buddhism, namely a “relatively conservative, non-feminist (in the emasculating, man-hating socia…
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…r state, while the second, using U.S. Department of State data, charts the number of refugees arriving in each state (from October 2014-July 2015), and the third offers “a compilation of Islamic terror activity by state” pairing the names of organizations with U.S. cities (for instance, Boca Raton, Florida, is flagged for “Al Qaeda”). The source for this map’s data, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, runs a more comprehensive map on their own…
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