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RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

By Tom Davis

…doubt, but his international celebrity and the moniker “America’s Pastor,” are largely the product of a best-selling self-help devotional, The Purpose Driven Life. Stunning skeptical publishers, the book has sold 25 million copies and is, according to Publisher’s Weekly, the best selling hardback in American history. Revenue from the book has enabled Warren to stop drawing a salary and to refund the 25 years of salary he’d already drawn. Furthermo…

LGBT Christians Respond to Southern Baptists’ Call For Kindness, Understanding

By Mike Greer

…r gay and lesbian youth as “a human dignity issue.” Moore emphatically declared that parents should never shun their gay children. Moore and other conference leaders appeared to be caught off guard by the number of LGBT Christians and supportive Christian advocates, some Baptists, who not only attended the entire conference, but also respectfully and publicly responded to Moore’s call to kindness and understanding and offered to meet with conferen…

‘My Name is Legion’: Sources and Forces of White Supremacy in the U.S.

By R. Drew Smith

…terate.” Because of what he considered to be a tendency by blacks toward “barbarism,” Chaffin believed that blacks “required the continual supervision of the white man to hold him in check.” The consequence of enslavement, he said, was that slaves were provided with conditions “more conducive to his happiness than any other the African has ever known.” The same kind of moral superiority of white slaveholders and moral deficiency of slaves was arti…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…ckoning. Houses of worship ought to serve as amplifiers, but for the most part they aren’t helping. I’m a preacher and I can say with near certainty that 99% of the sermons preached yesterday morning didn’t get close to the level of truth-telling that’s needed. Nor will the compulsory “thoughts and prayers” pronouncements, nor the words spoken at memorial services over the next days and weeks. Of course as a pastor I’m aware that words of consolat…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…ons 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 baptized we have you; you’re ours and you don’t have much to say about it.” Recent reports indicate that about 350 congregations have departed to affiliate with more conservative Anglican Bishops outside the US. Whether the remaining congregations are better off or not…

Raelians’ “Clitoraid” Met With Suspicion in Burkina Faso

By Joseph Laycock

…hat Westerners sometimes demonstrate in condemning a cultural practice as barbaric. Raelianism was founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon (a.k.a. Rael), who claimed to have contact with enlightened extraterrestrials called the Elohim who genetically engineered humanity. Their movement emphasizes technological Utopianism and has advocated genetically modified food (GMO) as well as cloning, which they regard as a step toward immortality. They also suppo…

Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

By Michael Bronski

…the idea of a homosexual person or a personal identity? Contemporary scholars argue that the moral transgression of Sodom was not male-male sexual relations, but the gross abuse of guests. The men of Sodom came to Lot’s door and demanded that he hand over his two male houseguests (angels in disguise) so they could forcibly “know” them. In Biblical language, “know” means to have sex with. So the Sodom story is about the threat of rape and the viol…

Religion vs. Science: America’s Perilous Fight

By Edward J. Larson

…win made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Renowned Harvard naturalist E.O. Wilson makes similar assertions. “The inexorable growth of [biology] continues to widen, not to close the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion,” Wilson wrote in 2005. “The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective ant…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…e over. Backing this view, and endorsing many of these books, is the exemplar par excellence of religio-political progressivism himself: former President Jimmy Carter. More evidence may be gleaned from the presidential nominating process that has unfolded before our eyes this year. Considering that adherents of the religious right comprise a core constituency in the Republican Party—and that their support arguably was the most important reason why…

Religious Leaders Need ‘Empty the Pews’ Which Chronicles the Darker Side of the ‘Nones’ Phenomenon

By Kaya Oakes

…to understand that most individual stories about religious disaffiliation are far more complicated than just checking “none of the above” on a survey. Stories about the decline in Gen Z, Millennial and Gen X believers are a regular feature in secular news—Religion News Service even publishes an entire column dedicated to statistical data on Nones, compiled by the sociologist Ryan Burge—and a growing number of books exploring the narrative stories…