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Before Oprah, There Was the “Hour of Power”: Crystal Cathedral Pastor Robert H. Schuller Has Died

By Cathleen Falsani

…ith its 10,000 panes of glass, seating for more than 2,700, and one of the world’s largest instruments — the Hazel Wright organ —was completed at a cost of $18 million and dedicated in 1980. In 2011, after mounting financial problems and infighting among church staff — including a rift between Schuller and his son (and heir apparent) the Rev. Robert Schuller, Jr., over the direction of church ministry — the Crystal Cathedral filed for bankruptcy,…

New Accusations Force the Question: Will Bishops “Be Held Accountable” on Sexual Abuse, as Francis Promised?

By Patricia Miller

…e held accountable’ for failing to protect children from sexual abuse,” as CNN put it. But can we expect former Altoona-Johnstown Bishop Joseph Adamec and current Bishop Mark L. Bartchak to face consequences for their failures? Will they be swift and severe? Accusations that a priest from the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese had been molesting children at orphanages in Central America on his annual visits went unheeded by the PA diocese for five years. T…

The Black and White (and Blood-Red) Roots of ISIS

By Hasan Azad

…d the women are being taken as wives by ISIS members. If such reports are true, these acts are in major contravention of the most basic precepts of Islamic rule. But then again we are dealing with a group that draws its inspiration from Wahhabism, a fundamentally anti-intellectual tradition. Taking its name from its founder Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703-1792), Wahhabism is based on the idea that Islam has been corrupted over the centuries; that Islam has…

The Kidnapping of Nigerian Girls, A Primer

By Gordon Haber

…ls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” Shekau said, according to a CNN translation. “There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women.” It is not an empty threat. Earlier this year, in Yobe state, 16 girls were abducted and married off. There have been numerous reports of rape, and escapees have related being used as “baby factories.” The Nigerian government claims to be handling the…

Mad Men’s Matt Weiner, Warrior Against Woo

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…u were an adult, and had lived through some fairly interesting things like World War II and the Great Depression and then this came along. And there was tremendous change, and the clichéd word turbulence, and free love, and things like that. But there’s free love in the 1920s; there’s free love in the 1930s; the beatnik movement in the 1950s. No one invented any of this. What was different in the 60s, according to Weiner, was that baby boomers wer…

Is Evangelicalism Too Nice?

By Eric C. Miller

…ist’s divinity, death, resurrection, etc. Both believe the Bible to be the Word of God, though they may quibble about its inspiration and interpretation. Both believe that Christian faith requires action in the world. But while Evans emphasizes the “nice” elements of the gospel, Darling fixates on the mean stuff. He then insists that the mean stuff be manifest in policy. The conflation of orthodox belief and discriminatory social policy is likely…

An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

By Anne Eggebroten

…is cracking. “What I would like to see is actually Christian honest people running the shop,” said Sinead O’Connor, speaking on CNN about her faith as a Catholic woman and the need for governmental change in the Church. “It seems to me that the Vatican don’t actually believe in God at all. They’re certainly not acting like they believe in a God that watches. A Christian is supposed to ask ‘What would Jesus do?’ and try to do it. Would Jesus have c…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…“Francis effect” from the pope’s first year. According to Daniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the chu…

Who’s Afraid of Sacred Soccer?

By Gary Laderman

…remain trapped in the same old patterns of thought that seek to divide the world into black and white, true and false, right and wrong, without paying sufficient attention to how muddled reality—and what counts as sacred—is for most of us. And, even more frightening to some, is that God really is irrelevant in the religious equation for a growing number of people. An atheist soccer fan can be religious, just as an evangelical Protestant soccer fan…

The Pope, the GOP, and the March for Life

By Sarah Posner

…outing that they aren’t “welcome” in New York; Sean Hannity even had a tantrum about moving elsewhere. Cardinal Timothy Dolan writes a litany of St. Patrick’s activities “respecting life,” asking at the end, “does any of this seem ‘extremist’ to you?” The March for Life is still a big deal. One of the nation’s two major parties supports it, and will later in the week that party will consider whether its candidates should be punished for being too…