Religion Dispatches
…children and the silence of too many white churches, Hamilton reminds us that black and brown lives matter. It reminds me that when the church refuses to speak, the Spirit will bear witness to the truth of God in the most unlikely places—because that is the Spirit’s way….
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…mplate setting moment. They prayed and God shook the place. Again the Holy Spirit comes and fills the disciples and they speak, but this speaking is already a joined speaking, a chorus of faith. They speak the word of God with boldness. This shaking of the Spirit is not simply a sign of power, but of pleasure. God’s excitement is evident here. Here and now God’s people are one—calling on the faith and boldness of Jesus to do the divine will. Here…
Read More…ld at the university in April 2010, Rodriguez maintained that white evangelicals need black and Latino evangelicals to succeed: “Let me be very blunt here. I don’t believe white evangelicals or white conservatives alone can repudiate the spirit of Herod, the spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah, the spirit of Jezebel.” Rodriguez may be leading a new movement, but if he is, it’s a pretty narrow one: social issues culture warriors disgusted with the GOP’s o…
Read More…o be different, and they are, but down deep their roots converge. The same spirit of curiosity that animated Newton, animated Darwin. It is this spirit of inquiry that is at issue, not certain showpieces of scientific end-product. But it is unthinkable for Ham or the Discovery Institute to publicly reject “the spirit of inquiry,” so they focus — as they do so often — on externals, and wind up accepting only self-selected pieces of science. They ar…
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…’m hanging out here at the Wild Goose Festival celebrating art, music, and spirituality. I just wanted you to know that you’re a child of God, and I’m a child of God. No matter what your sexual orientation is, you are a child of God. I sincerely want you to know that it does get better, and there are a lot of people at this festival who would like to tell you that as well. The large audience—which included many evangelical Christians—echoed the vi…
Read More…eyard denomination) and Charles Kraft, began there to hone his ideas about spiritual mapping, spiritual warfare, and power encounters. Leaving the seminary in the early 1990s to establish a ministry in Colorado Springs, Wagner began to build his empire, founding the NAR in 2001. The 21st century, for Wagner, is the beginning of the “Second Apostolic Age.” Those in the NAR believe that in order to bring about the coming of Christ, Apostles must be…
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…isagreement and dissent, and most importantly, it created an atmosphere of spiritual and social flexibility essential to meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century. The reception of the reforms was quite uneven across the country, and so we need to be careful in describing what actually occurred. Anything you had to leave out? I visited every parish I discussed in the book, beginning with my great grandparents’ ancestral villages in German…
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…isville and before the fundamentalist takeover of the seminary in the early 1990s Crescent Hill was the spiritual home for many students, staff, and distinguished professors. Today the 800-member church is a diverse community of faith including people of various races, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, and world-views. Refugees and immigrants compose roughly one-third of the congregation. The church is heavily invested in a wide array of soc…
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…ntial property, although it has been in use as a medical facility since the 1950s, collecting 14,000 petition signatures to push for a city planning commission hearing. Their argument, ironically, was that the disruption anti-abortion protesters would bring—coming to the neighborhood in groups as large as 500 for some regular events, with smaller protests around the clock—would constitute a nuisance and safety concern. “We told the city that if th…
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…heir conscience. Olympics Postscript: Team LGBT beats every country that criminalizes gays Outsports reports, “The publicly out gay, lesbian and bisexual Olympic athletes in Rio outperformed expectations, with 25 of the 53 publicly out athletes winning medals.” Together they accounted for 14 medals (accounting for team sports such as the four out women played on the US basketball team). Notes Outsports, “Those 14 medals beat every single country t…
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