Religion Dispatches
…of peace has been sitting in a drawer ready to be implemented for at least 15 years, and most of us think Christian Zionism is an impediment toward peace in the Middle East.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has reported that about 20 to 40 million Americans are Christian Zionists. “I would say the whole flier seems to me to be describing a stereotype of a Christian Zionist,” Brog said. “There are some Christian Zionists who are opposed…
Read More…t them, “Liberals and the NDP get ‘a walk to power.’” Marriage was among a number of controversial issues voted on, including provisions on marijuana and assisted dying: In a release Thursday, Charles McVety, the head of the 148,000-member Institute for Canadian Values lobby group, warned Conservatives who had previously sought the support of his organization were about to renege on commitments to uphold key principles. Meanwhile, a group of promi…
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…ne of evangelical conviction,” is the focus on international Christianity. Number five on the CT list: Christians flee Iraq and Gaza: About 13,000 Christians—or one in two—left Mosul in October. In Gaza, churches where hundreds worshiped until recently are attended by less than a dozen. Historic Christian communities are becoming history. 4.) TOP TEN ONION RELIGION STORIES: “Jewish Elders Lift Ham Ban.” For instance. 5.) TOP TEN ABUSES OF RELIGION…
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…ews will likely take Spain and Portugal by storm…Imagine if just 5% or even 10% of Spanish and Portuguese descendants of Jews were to return to Judaism. It would mean an additional 500,000 to 1 million Jews in the world.” Interestingly enough, one of those who has found Freund’s work fascinating is James M. Hutchens of the Christian Zionist “Jerusalem Connection,” who has been promoting the piece. Why? Bartholomew: “I can see why Freund would enth…
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…vement. I also think there are common misconceptions about both health and spirituality that prevent us from seeing the relationship between the two. In the U.S. today, religion and medicine are often seen as separate spheres—mirroring Descartes’ erroneous understanding of the “mind” as independent from the “body.” I like to point out that the etymology of the term “salvation”—which comes from the Latin, salve, which means “good health” and is som…
Read More…ng forward a Marriage Equality Bill, which will be debated in the Senate on 18 June, and will go to a vote on 12 November.” BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder examined the potential impact of the vote in other countries, including Italy — the only Western European nation that provides no legal recognition to same-sex couples – where Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has promised a vote on civil union legislation by the end of the summer, and Germany, where Prime M…
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…d under collective bargaining agreements—continued its steady rise into the 1950s and 1960s, creating something new on the face of the earth: a working class capable of enjoying a middle-class living standard. As late as 1973—also the peak year for real worker income in the United States—union density hovered at around 25% in the private sector. Today that number is just 7.4%. The bargaining power and the political clout of organized labor have be…
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…ogy of Benedict, many Catholics are already being encouraged to take their spiritual business elsewhere. We have seen an increase in the number of American politicians who are asked to remove themselves from communion lines and, recently, priests have even denied parishioners communion if they vote for a political candidate who favors abortion rights. This exclusion from the sacrament is essentially a form of excommunication. Dogma Over Diplomacy…
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…nce existed mainly to train full-time pastors faced reductions in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a…
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…rs takes a similar tack. In a formal statement initially adopted during the 1980s in opposition to young-earth creationism and always controversial among theists, the group defined evolution as “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process of temporal descent with gradual modification.” In 1997, responding to ID challenges, the association deleted the words “unsupervised” and “impersonal” from the statement. Its executive direct…
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