Religion Dispatches
…led for Anchorage, Alaska for the weekend of September 13, which was being promoted by Wasilla Bible Church, the home church of Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP’s nominee vice presidential nominee. According to piece by Wayne Beson, the executive director of Truth Wins Out, that appeared in the Falls Church News-Press Online, Wasilla Bible Church “was caught promoting” the LWO conference through a Bible insert that read, “You’ll be encouraged by the powe…
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…g the 1912 “Men and Religion Forward” movement—a national revival aimed at promoting the kingdom—Hobson shared the stage of the Brooklyn Tabernacle with Booker T. Washington and claimed that African Americans would degenerate into cannibals if they were permitted to drink alcohol. Christians, he felt, needed to lead the world toward sobriety through law, through example, and through education. Hobson’s take on drugs was quite similar. After Prohib…
Read More…ecarity with respect to the law. What is incumbent on religious protesters today is not just to fill up the jails, but to multiply. The Berrigans created their audience by being paid attention. And this is what religious protesters are doing brilliantly today: in protests, online, in their communities, even in their classrooms. The strategies are many, but the goals can only be achieved if attention increases. If movements form, rather than occasi…
Read More…taxpayers. I would urge the president to reconsider the statements he made today, and stick to his campaign promise of 2008 by signing an executive order barring any taxpayer funding of religious organizations that discriminate on the basis of belief.” UPDATE: The Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a CARD member, weighs in with a scathing statement: Frankly, the President’s response that he has “struck the right balance so fa…
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…nal Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Theological Seminary, Christianity Today, and a huge network of radio and television stations and programs. Evangelicals redoubled their commitment to convert the “heathens” of the Global South exactly when ecumenicals pulled back from the goal of conversion, which they increasingly considered to be too imperialistic. This difference in missionary outlook strikingly illustrated the persistent evangelical bel…
Read More…ement on the group’s Italian-language website declared, “Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organization spreads around the world.” The statement alluded to the burning of heretics, the repression of Galileo, the genocide of Native Americans, aiding Nazi fugitives, and the more recent sexual abuse scandal. Anonymous members attemp…
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…ffiliated were not likely to stay that way as adults, two-thirds of adults today who were raised without religion stay nonreligious. In other words, this is becoming permanent. Circumstances, of course, have changed since the 1970s. Greater rates of religious intermarriage, including marriages between religious and nonreligious couples, mean that children are growing up with differing ideas about religiosity than they had in the past. Gen Xers are…
Read More…by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it at all.” Today, Cuba is more in our reach. As a Cuban-American from Miami I have been raised amidst the existential crisis of the Cuban exile community, a community with a rabid anger towards the Castro regime and simultaneous love and compassion for their fellow Cubans on the island. I, like many children of exiles, was raised holding my breath for the death of Fidel Castro, for an…
Read More…cent of them have a favorable view of Netanyahu, according to Pew poll out today, and conducted during the escalating controversy over the prime minister’s speech. Meanwhile, 53 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of the Israeli leader, reflecting, as the Pew report explains, divides that are religious as well as partisan: “Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants have the most favorable impressions of Netanyahu (50% favorabl…
Read More…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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