Religion Dispatches
…of Washington National Cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Church and the site of many presidential funerals and major national interfaith gatherings. The Episcopal Church, a small but prominent Protestant denomination, has been generally in favor of gay equality for years but the Cathedral leadership has been raising the bar in the last few months. It’s not that religious groups haven’t been part of celebrations before – it’s that gay-affirming…
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…thers is not only permissible but actually necessary. When all the prerequisites for engaging in such an act are met, this is regarded as an act of great moral courage. Drawing from earlier scriptures, the fourth-century Indian Buddhist master Asaṅga speaks of a threefold classification of “giving” that includes giving material goods, spiritual counsel, and life. Of these three, Asaṅga considers offering up one’s life to be the highest form of giv…
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…-based religious organizations grasp the complexities of this reality. The best ones actively seek to redress it. And that is where the gap between the so-called New Atheism and radical or culturally relevant humanism lies. Is there anything you had to leave out? More discussion about abortion and reproductive justice vis-à-vis all of the draconian legislation that’s come down from states like Kansas, North Dakota, Texas and Mississippi. The fac…
Read More…human flesh: Archaeologists excavating a trash pit at the Jamestown colony site in Virginia have found the first physical evidence of cannibalism among the desperate population, corroborating written accounts left behind by witnesses. Cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609. The remains were excavated by ar…
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…r avatar. While some accounts, such as @request_prayers and its affiliated site www.prayerrequest.com, are crowdsourced, others have volunteer prayer teams standing by. @OurPrayer, the prayer request handle for Guideposts magazine, offers a description of its service that could serve as a script for heaven’s own automated telephone response system: “Your prayer concerns are important to us,” OurPrayer.org says, “and that’s why each and every praye…
Read More…arr says that internet journalism is maturing—and that the technology that sites are built on, and that reporters use to do their work, is not the ‘wingman,’ as he puts it, but The Man. While we’d rather see technology as a multi-armed goddess, we’re with Carr otherwise. Packer’s objections are standard issue: there’s no quality control in new media, no money to pay reporters. And you can practically hear the shudder behind the word “blogger,” as…
Read More…ent years crafting. What does surprise me is this: Evidently a non-trivial number of readers of Beliefnet out there are offended by the word feminist. They don’t just disagree with certain tenets of feminism (which is far from monolithic, btw). They don’t just think, “Eh, that’s not really my thing, but whatevs, I like the site anyway and there are zillions of other people to read there. Oh, say! I think I’ll take the ‘What religion are you?’ quiz…
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…g, was published in the same year. Its popularity—the book was a Christian bestseller—and Harris’ name recognition helped bring SGM to greater prominence among evangelicals. Mahaney eventually appointed Harris as his successor as senior pastor of CLC in 2004. The two men now boast ties with some of the biggest names in reformed evangelicalism, including Albert Mohler, president of the country’s largest Southern Baptist seminary, and Seattle’s “cus…
Read More…hat it’s about 4.54 billion years old, give or take a bit, and also that a site claiming the earth is about 6,000 years old comes up before the scientific answer. You could see how that could be confusing for someone who’s “not a scientist.”) But he does say, “I can tell you what the Bible says,” implying there’s a biblical answer that does—and should!—resolve the dispute. See, he’s been trained to say that the Bible provides the answer. On the ot…
Read More…Wamukoya, age 61, was elected last July by clergy and laity in Swaziland, site of the 1992 conference at which women in the ACSA were given access to ordained ministry in the church. Bishop Wamukoya, formerly a bi-vocational University chaplain and city administrator, will be joined in the archdiocese by another woman bishop, the Rev. Margaret Vertue, who was elected to the Diocese of False Bay in October and will be consecrated in the new year….
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