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Dear Common Grounders, Religious Progressives, and Ecumenical Seminaries…

…l scholarship, a yet more widespread commentary on the tendency of many of today’s evangelical leaders to focus on tiny segments of scripture—this might be a valuable service. And might it cement an accommodation not with the evangelicals, but with secular intellectuals? That might be a good thing. The salient solidarity today may not be with the community of faith but among those who accept Enlightenment-generated standards for cognitive plausibi…

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The Bleeding Heart of Muslim Europe

…Take Ataturk, father of an ostensibly Central Asian nation; he was born in today’s Macedonia, his features strikingly and suspiciously Slavic—blond hair and blue eyes. The 1990s war awakened many of these connections, and as Turkey in many respects challenges Ataturk’s legacy (especially his late 19th-century romantic European nationalism), the older truths of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage gain visibility. Not to resurrect empire, but to rediscover th…

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Worse Than the Robber Barons

…ycoons—the Ones with the Diamond Stickpins Let me say a bit more about why today’s smooth operators are more loathsome than the tycoons of old. T.J. Stiles’ prizewinning new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt shows the old reprobate to have been driven, ruthless, and sometimes brutal in pursuit of what he wanted. But always mindful of time and chance and never pretending to be of a superior species than the people he outwitted and exploited. It is…

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In Marriage Decision, An Ode to Love and Four Provocations

…faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.” It’s not surprising, then, that the American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp said in a statement this afternoon,”Today’s opinion creates the Church of the Supreme Court, with President Obama serving as its High Priest.” That’s undoubtedly only the beginning of the overheated rhetoric to come. The majority opinion, though, gamed out all these arguments. “Man…

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Rising Christian Right Movement, New Apostolic Reformation, Emerged as a Mid-20th Century Splinter of White Supremacy

…the Bible). This approach to race is known as two-seed theory, and it was promoted by none other than William Branham, the Latter Rain leader. In fact, Branham was ordained into ministry by Roy Davis, the National Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Today’s NAR leaders seem untroubled by Branham’s associations with White supremacism and laud him as an early prophet of their movement. One former elder at Bethel Church, a NAR powerhouse in Redding…

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Is Zionism No Longer Able to Offer Solutions to the Present Reality?

…wars of twenty-first century America, as they should be. Manifest Destiny today has become the provenance of the far right in America, while liberal and progressive Americans have rejected it out of hand. Yet ironically, the illiberal Zionism of the “untroubled committed” now rules the state of Israel. Hartman may not be able to change that reality, so he wants to change the story. Is it possible, today, for one to not be a Zionist and still be p…

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TED-Evangelism Harkens Back to a Forgotten 19th-Century Tradition

…but what we have here, mostly, is a particular aesthetic (“The TED talk is today a sentimental form,” Nathan Heller writes in The New Yorker). Wright describes this aesthetic in frankly spiritual terms. TED talks, he told me, are in keeping with “a kind of civic religion of aspiration and self-reliance and communal progress.” When I brought up this hope-and-progress energy with Vanderbilt historian Paul Stob, a scholar of intellectual culture, he…

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Obama and the Unbelievers: The Future of Secularism

…ectarian and the rabbi complied. The prayers were addressed to “God of the Free, Hope of the Brave” and basically gave thanks. Though obviously addressed to God, the prayers were pitched to minimize anyone’s discomfort. Of course, even nonsectarian prayer contradicts the secular paradigm of government neutrality toward religion and the wall of separation. But as we saw at the inauguration, the courts are not going to enforce that secular paradigm….

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The Critiques of Evangelical Writers Opposing Christian Nationalism Fail to Recognize Evangelicalism’s Troubling History

…ee other causes. First, the birth rate declined rapidly as the ecumenicals promoted contraception and encouraged the entry of women into the workforce. Evangelical parents had scads of children, more even than Catholic parents during the baby boom and the decades following. Second, and yet more important, millions of young people left their parents’s church, having become involved in secular communities promoted by the social movements of the 1960…

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Legacy of Eugenics and Racism Can’t Be Ignored

…d only truly became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and is known today as one of the most influential Catholic theologians with regards to evolution in the second half of the 20thcentury. To chart this influence, one need only note Teilhard’s citations by the three most recent Popes. In 2003, Pope Saint John Paul II echoed Teilhard’s vision of a cosmic Eucharist in the encyclical Ecclesia Eucharista: Because even when it is celebrated on…

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