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Conservative Hardliners at Synod Prompt Question: “What Are We Doing Here?”

By Patricia Miller

…y Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto, warning against breeding a sense of ‘pastoral despair.’ However, one of the German bishops cautioned that holding the hard line on the communion teaching in the face of the realities faced by divorced couples makes people “doubt God.” Archbishop Heiner Koch said, “More than a few people concerned leave the Church with their children on the basis of what they see as a rejection,” reports Joshua McElwee in the N…

Exclusion is Causing Great Harm: A Conversation With Suspended UMC Pastor Rev. Cynthia Meyer

By Joel Pitney

…itney: How did you get into the ministry? Cynthia Meyer: My family did not participate actively in the church at all, but as a junior high kid, I was drawn to youth group. So I got involved in my local United Methodist Church pretty deeply during my junior high and high school years, participating in youth programs and trips. The church helped me learn about the world. That really meant a lot to me. By the time I was a senior in high school, I had…

How Religion Shapes (or Doesn’t) Our Views on Public Issues

By Daniel Schultz

…health care reform debate. (Conversely, .82x.26=.21, or nearly all of the Republican base.) Second: nobody gives a rat’s patootie about religious views on immigration or the environment, except religious leaders. Common ground built on uncontroversial issues does not work. Nobody cares about “creation care,” nobody cares about “the least of these” in the desert. Not many, anyway. What does work? Not much, it would seem. At least not when it comes…

The Messiah is Not Coming

By Peter Laarman

…am economists gauge it, and the economic well-being of everyday people has parted company for good. Political life: Here the rapid evaporation of the middle produces grave disfigurations. The Tea Party phenomenon is just one example. As the anxious middle moves toward the fringe, the despairing new poor drop out altogether, while the angry rich fight for their pelf, in part by creating a whole new underground political strike force. In their impor…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…courts; namely, that discussions of religion should neither promote nor disparage particular religious beliefs, nor favor religion or non-religion over the other. The First Amendment Center’s The Bible & Public Schools: A First Amendment Guide and the Society of Biblical Literature’s Bible Electives in Public Schools: A Guide provided a starting point from which to consider whether a course’s approach could be considered nonsectarian. The results…

Religion and Resistance at the New National Museum of African American History and Culture

By Anita Little

…g off of that question, in what way is black history and black present inseparable from black religion? A major question is: how do you separate out this story? For example, if we’re looking at 1968, and we’re studying the Black Panthers or Black Power, we tend to assume that story is different from 1964 with the story of Rev. Martin Luther King. But we forget the religious influence that happened in both of those. For me, all of this is really me…

“Real” Evangelicals Don’t Support Trump? Not So Fast…

By Neil J. Young

…r “never” attend church still see themselves as evangelical, they do so in part because of a capacious evangelical theology that holds up the born-again experience as the singular determinant of true Christianity while allowing for a range of worship practices and secondary beliefs. Although most evangelical theologians would argue that religious conversion should bring with it certain behaviors, including regular church attendance, clearly many A…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…high-poverty neighborhoods at their own volition, entering and leaving as part of a weekly Sunday commute, and capable of opting (individually or institutionally) for quite different locations and demographic and social environments if deemed necessary. Impoverished residents are less able to relocate at will, but even when they do they may change their location but likely not their social and demographic environment. For contemporary churches to…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…hat’s the point of free will. However, it wouldn’t be free will unless the partnered gay Christian has the ability to choose to live as a partnered gay Christian. Once these ideas were given voice the conversation quickly shifted, as each heard the other for the first time. When social policy, theology, and personally-tied emotions are parted for even the slightest moment, it becomes clear that at a base level no one wants their story or their jou…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…once-vibrant popular democracy. Speaking as an incorrigible Roundhead, I insist that the revolutionary struggle is far from over and that indifference and/or indolence are unacceptable in these circumstances. To use Paine’s language, we don’t need the the kind of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots who will stuff themselves with “birthday” cake this weekend while remaining oblivious to the stakes in the present crisis….