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An Extravagant Welcome For All: Believe Out Loud, a Faith-Based LGBT Campaign, Launches

By Peter Laarman

…nd friends are calling for full inclusion in the life of the church. Clergy, too, are hearing their call for justice and hearing God’s call to leadership. Believe Out Loud will equip these clergy to take up the prophetic mantle with pastoral grace in ways that are consistent with their individual faith traditions. Some secular LGBT advocates (none of whom wished to be identified for this report) have questioned why an effort of this scale and soph…

YOU Are Spiritual But Not Religious: The Secret Spiritual History of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books

By Daniel Silliman

…ties make choices all the time. The history of our species is amazing: fire, numbers, alphabets or pictographic language, medicine, architecture, money and banking, art, music, laws etc. Choices got us there. We are still making choices both as individuals and societies. Not all of them are good—but, we can change the bad choices, we hope. The children’s series that Montgomery helped to create put readers in exactly that position, again and again….

A Post-Christian America? Not Quite—Though Devoutly to be Wished

By Peter Laarman

…Obama’s Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Kissling wrote, aptly, that “junk religion”— conservative Christianity in particular—is extremely well represented on the panel. Moreover, she makes this important observation: …under the Bush administration the views of Council members on these issues were largely irrelevant. President Obama has made these views important as a substantial part of the Council’s mission relates to women’s…

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

By Peter Laarman

…eep openly. Weep for a country that seems irredeemably lost in so many ways, a country where, in the words of Paul Simon’s equally haunting “American Tune”: I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered I don’t have a friend who feels at ease I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees The thing is, we do know what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders wh…

Obama in Copenhagen: From an Embarrassment of Riches to a New Earth Ethic

By Peter Laarman

…ventually happens to energy-rich people—people whose lifestyles are powered, literally, by the earth’s past organic life in the form of petroleum—is that such people grow addicted to power in unlimited applications. There is no question that Americans’ fabled restlessness, the lack of stability in our lives, is deeply connected to the capacity of internal combustion engines to propel a “cabin” on four wheels along the pavement. A case can even be…

Catholic Leaders Offer Criticism, Support to Boxer Pacquiao After Anti-Gay Comments…

By Peter Montgomery

…Al-Azhar University in Cairo, who made his first visit to Jakarta this week, to, in the words of the Jakarta Post, “further enhance cooperation with Indonesia in promoting moderate Islam.” From the Imam’s interview: This major propaganda is orchestrated by various international institutions and organizations using all kinds of methods and instruments such as the mass media and seminars, involving a number of celebrated figures and other possible m…

Life as a Game Show: Reading Slumdog Millionaire

By Paul Courtright

…more star power in India than Regis Philbin did in America; and a crore (10,000,000 Rupees) is a lot more money relative to the Indian economy than a million dollars is in America. Bachchan was huge; the show was huge. What is it about this film, with a seemingly random set of game show trivia questions at its center, that has captured our imagination? Why now? And, what does Slumdog Millionaire have to do with religion? It is Written The film beg…

The Fretting About Whether Democrats Are “Friendly” To Religion

By Sarah Posner

…er peaking at 38% in mid-2008 during Obama’s presidential election campaign, the number of Americans describing the Democratic Party as friendly toward religion returned in mid-2009 to levels similar to those seen in 2005 through 2007. About one-in-five say Democrats are unfriendly toward religion (22%), up from 15% who felt that way last year but about the same as in surveys conducted in 2005 and 2006. Views of the Democrats’ stance toward religi…

Demonized and Demonizing No More.

By Joanna Brooks

…Some would make it so that you have to be completely on board with point X, Y, and Z in order to even count as an atheist. As a former fundamentalist Christian, I understand that impulse, but I am surprised by how pervasive it is within organized atheism. I read about a recent study of Finnish atheists and religionists in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion that found that the concept of God had as powerful an emotional force…

Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…ave explained the inner workings of the company better than Eric Scheibeler, who, along with his wife, reached the founder’s Emerald level—a level less than 1/25th of one percent of Amway participants are able to achieve—before they uncovered company fraud and deception, and were hounded out of the organization. Scheibeler explains how Amway operates in his book Merchants of Deception: An Insider’s Look at the Worldwide, Systematic, Conspiracy of…