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Amazing Grace: Obama Hits a Blue Note in Charleston

By Peter Manseau

…very single syllable!” The “Amazing Grace” heard last week at the memorial service of Reverend Clementa Pinckney in Charleston was clearly part of the black church tradition. Barack Obama is no Al Green, but in the words of Questlove from the hiphop soul band The Roots, the president’s rendition included “the blackest blues note ever,” an echo of both the enduring significance of this English hymn to African American culture, and its apocryphal hi…

Pricey Tickets, Cranky Citizens, and Priests Behind Bars as Philadelphia Prepares For Papal Visit

By Anthea Butler

…me restless, and their ire has been focused on Mayor Nutter and the Secret Service. In a hastily put together meeting last week, Donna Crilley Farrell, the executive director of the World Meeting of Families (WMOF) announced that the papal events were going to be ticketed—after having already promoted the Papal visit as “free and open” to the public on the conference website. As a result, some hotel rooms are being cancelled, people are angry, and…

Kim Davis, County Clerk, is Not a Person

By Ivan Strenski

…,” the use for which you have to pay what he demands on top of the cost of service. Tony’s “businesses” are very personal things, part of himself. And, thinking this way about public offices is precisely what defines “corruption” means. Flip the coin, and just as Kim Davis does not own the County clerkship, despite her mother having served in it before her, Kim’s private property, say, her body, does not belong to the state. The temptation is grea…

Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…echnology, and culture, the report offers two insights–one about religious services, and one about the difficulties of studying etiquette through surveys. It’s “Generally Not OK,” But… One part of the Pew study asked respondents to gauge the appropriateness of using cellphones in various places, including whether it is “generally okay or not okay for people to use their cellphones…at church or [a] worship service.” A full 96% of those surveyed cho…

Kentucky Court Clerk, A “Professing Apostolic Christian,” Questions Legal Authority

By Sarah Posner

…urt papers as “a professing Apostolic Christian who attends church worship service multiple times per week, attends weekly Bible study, and leads a weekly Bible study with women at a local jail.” That might leave a lot of people scratching their heads, as this description is not as recognizable as “Presbyterian” or “Baptist” or “evangelical.” So what does that mean? I asked our own (very busy covering the Pope) Anthea Butler, a religious historian…

A Nazi, a Jewish Prisoner, and a “Magic” Bible, Or, Christian Romance Fiction Gone Very, Very Wrong

By Julia Seymour

…he gripped my hand in the doorway of the church, following the Good Friday service, “I’ve never really liked Jews.” I had just finished a sermon in which I decried present-day harassment of Jews in the Ukraine and noted that we are kidding ourselves if we thought we would treat Jesus better now than he was treated then. We prayed. We grieved. I again felt the chasm between Christianity, the religion of my heart, and Judaism, the religion of my blo…

‘Barbaric’ v ‘Progressive’ Islam; Catholic Church Objects to Mexican Court OK For Gay Adoption; Malaysian Court Weighs Boundaries Of Civil and Shariah Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ding to a statement that was recently republished by the Presbyterian News Service. “After a debate that began in 2011 … our church, that had initially decided to continue in partnership, in this last General Assembly, made the decision to interrupt the official partnership with this beloved church,” the IPIB announced in a statement. “Despite this notable contribution to the expansion of God’s Kingdom in the world and especially in Brazil, our ch…

Millennials Put Off By Rigid, Judgmental Religion Offered … More Orthodoxy

By Daniel Schultz

…y helping anyone in need. You’ll notice that Shrum never says a word about service or ministry. It’s all holiness all the time. Unfortunately for churches like Shrum’s, holiness just isn’t very popular in our culture these days. What people want in spirituality is egalitarianism, an emphasis on the ways in which God welcomes, rather than rejects. It’s okay that Shrum or other conservative pastors might say “Sorry, we can’t offer that in our church…

The Martyrdom of Cecil the Lion

By Jacob J. Erickson

…human creatures, we are alone, hanging out occasionally with Kenyan Forest Service. There are false perceptions that ebola is in East Africa and that terrorism abounds, and the parks have emptied of the usual tourists and missionaries (tourists themselves, in the neocolonial sense). William and I pack up the tent for the night and we get up early, go for a morning drive, as is our usual custom (he grew up here). The morning breeze whipping by the…

Strangest Hot Take of the Day: Why Evangelicals Like Trump

By Sarah Posner

…ti-immigrant diatribe, but at his weak stances on their key issues. In the service of explaining what there is of an evangelical attraction to Trump (and, as I wrote earlier this week, it is there, although by no means a majority), Brody portrays Trump as a no-holds-barred honest broker and, therefore, victim of the media. That’s why, he says, evangelicals can relate. “Donald Trump operates in a world of absolutes,” Brody writes. “A world of right…