Religion Dispatches
…ve religion and politics, and he has been interviewed by many national and international media including CBS Evening News, ABC’s 20/20, the BBC (radio and television), and the Voice of America. Through a series of e-mail exchanges, we discussed the current state of the Religious Right, the growing influence and media presence of Pastor Rick Warren, efforts made by the Obama campaign to court evangelicals, and how an authentic Religious Left can wi…
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…ly branding Rwanda the first officially “Purpose-Driven nation,” after his international bestseller, The Purpose-Driven Life. The US government has fallen in line, pledging federal “faith-based” funding to augment Warren’s freelance foreign policy, which emphasizes Rwanda’s transformation (or, perhaps, conversion?) through small-scale capitalism and personal responsibility. Obama, meanwhile, has pledged to expand Bush’s Faith-Based Initiatives pro…
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…re. The Origins of the Fight for Women’s Equality in the Church St. Joan’s International Alliance, a suffrage group founded in London in 1911, was the first to raise the ordination question. According to Belgian writer Anne Marie Pelzer, the Alliance put to the Holy Father its first official request for women to become deacons (1961), then for lay men and women to be present at the Council, as observers and experts (1962). In 1963, it presented a…
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…. They did. Vereide died in 1969, but his organization—known in his day as International Christian Leadership, in ours as the Fellowship Foundation or the Family—still prospers. In a recent survey of 360 evangelical leaders—not preachers but politicians and businesspeople—Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay found that a plurality named the Fellowship one of the most influential religious groups in Washington. “There is no other organiza…
Read More…bernacles, which began Monday and ends Oct. 21. The parade, which the Associated Press called “the latest display of the growing alliance between evangelical Christians and the Jewish state,” was sponsored by The International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem, which was founded in 1980 and was described by the AP as “a global organization that promotes ties between Israel and the world’s Christian communities.”…
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…we’re going to return to our wedding vows.” Engle and his cofounder of the International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Kansas City, evangelist Mike Bickle, insist that continual prayer is required for this covenantal relationship to be restored in preparation for Jesus’ return. Bickle said, “God wants to build a global house of prayer before Jesus returns,” and Engle called it “a global army of prayer in the last days.” “Do you believe America can cha…
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…ltations on AIDS/HIV and Islam in South Africa sponsored by Islamic Relief International. The Sahgha Metta project brings Buddhist monks together to work on both prevention and care. And President-elect Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Global Summit on AIDS and the Church sponsored by evangelical Christian Rick Warren that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.” But it a…
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…(in the midst of an already ferocious insurgent war) in Iraq produced huge numbers of weekly attacks and casualties, averaging 2,000 attacks per month. The numbers then dropped dramatically as ethnic cleansing was completed in many areas, the “surge” of U.S. forces restricted the flow of explosives into Baghdad, the Mahdi Army suspended its attacks, and the U.S. co-opted Sunni insurgents. But violence has spiked again recently; it’s a perilous bus…
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…ltations on AIDS/HIV and Islam in South Africa sponsored by Islamic Relief International. The Sangha Metta Project brings Buddhist monks together to work on both prevention and care. And President-elect Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Global Summit on AIDS and the Church, sponsored by evangelical Christian Rick Warren, that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that ‘if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.’ But it…
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…tical, and business connections to the Saudi royal family; and to apparent international slush funds and money-laundering schemes. Much of this is told in such a matter-of-fact fashion that it is easy to lose sight of the significance of many of the individual facts. Read more here. The layers of secrecy were peeled back on a need-to-know basis over time. Unbeknownst to Wead, for example, the younger Bush had been a voracious consumer of Wead’s me…
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