Search for "VIPREG2024 promo code for 1xbet free bet Saudi Arabia"

Is America Willing to Be Freed from Its Demons?

By Willie James Jennings

…s our enemies, and the latter constructs a false sense of independence and freedom.” I don’t know if we Americans, especially Christians in America, want to be freed from our demons. The late New Testament scholar Walter Wink defined the demonic as an array of human and supra-human forces aligned to destroy life. The demonic was both individual and structural, personal and collective, sentient and mechanical. Wink’s expansive way of writing about…

Bloody Religious Conflict on the Way Out?

By Ira Chernus

…uraging: Around the world, we are seeing the growth of the American-style “free religious marketplace.” Religions are gradually becoming commodities that private individuals can accept or reject at their own discretion. The various religions must compete for the consumer loyalty, which means they must adapt to consumer preference. This is the inevitable result of the privatization of religion, as Berger explained in The Sacred Canopy. And when rel…

Show Me the Way of the Hebrews: The Making of an African American Rabbi

By J. Lester Feder

…this New Testament nonsense—we’re not doing that no more,’” he remembers. Bethel voted to break from the House of God, though about a third of the congregation left Bethel, choosing Jesus over Mother. This included her son George, who remains a House of God bishop to this day. Once Mother Dailey made this leap, she was neither gentle nor quiet. “This ain’t no milk and no eggs,” she warned during a sermon broadcast on the radio. “This is meat! You…

How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

By Eric C. Miller

…elites could pit the masses against each other, creating a vertical divide between the people in place of a horizontal divide between the classes. That’s how it stops being a democratizing force and starts to insulate the status quo. Gratitude operates in a similar way, with similar potentials. When we find ourselves in a position of owing—and people in a democratic society always owe something to other people—we may become vulnerable to control….

We Can’t Have Religious Freedom Without Reproductive Freedom

By Frederick Clarkson and Cari Jackson

…under the First Amendment. We think it’s time for us all to seek religious freedom for reproductive freedom, and to recognize that persistent efforts to interfere in reproductive decisions is “an infringement of a natural right” in the sense the Virginia Statute warned. Of course, women didn’t share in this natural right at the time—but the right to believe differently than the rich and the powerful as codified in the Statute and the First Amendme…

The Islamophobia Dodge of the Religious Freedom Pledge

By Sarah Posner

…tian. What’s more, though, is how Christian candidates who’ve done much to promote a lack of religious freedom for other religions (e.g., Michele Bachmann’s worry that sharia will “usurp the Constitution” or Newt Gingrich’s calls to ban sharia law because it is “a comprehensive political, economic and religious movement that seeks to impose sharia—Islamic law—upon all aspects of global society”) or who have done little to tamp it down (e.g., Rick…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…on the planet. The Wagner Leadership Institute is currently offering, for free, a one-hour lecture by Wagner, session number 4 of WLI course AP825 (the “AP” stands for “Apostles and Prophets”). For getting a basic understanding of the movement Wagner refers to, and has played a key role in catalyzing, one probably couldn’t do much better than to watch this lecture. C. Peter Wagner is a seasoned, professional educator… who aims to transform the bi…

Holy Father, You’re Not Helping: The Problem with the Pope’s Plan to Consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

By Katherine Kelaidis

…octrine of the Immaculate Conception, which holds that the Virgin Mary was free from Original Sin, is not a doctrine shared between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. In fact, it’s only been an official part of Catholic teaching since 1854. While the Eastern churches agree with Catholics that Mary was free from personal sin, the fact that the Eastern church has never accepted Augustine’s teaching on Original Sin means that the doctrine is superfl…

As Hobby Lobby Heads to SCOTUS, Let’s Ditch Kosher Butcher Analogies

By Sarah Posner

…about Hobby Lobby’s RFRA case, pointing out that “protecting the religious freedom of employers under RFRA presents a risk of imposing significant costs on employees.” In any case, as Marty Lederman has explained, the Court has never recognized a religious freedom infringement claim by a for-profit entity: In their scores of briefs, the plaintiffs and their many amici fail to cite a single case, apart from the current contraception coverage litig…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ting new people, and the “unitive” purpose of fostering love and closeness between a heterosexual married couple. It did so partly to correct a prevailing notion that any non-procreative sex was a sin—even, for example, sex between a married couple where one or both partners were infertile.) Yet even with all their emphasis on procreation, ancient theologians didn’t bring much rosy optimism to pregnancy and childbirth. To the contrary, many though…