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Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

…the height of the battling, that it was all not such a big deal, that the number of dissidents was actually quite small and that he thought his church would be better off once they were gone.   Indeed, according to Wikipedia there are over 7,000 Episcopal congregations in the US with over 2 million members, though the significance of that number is unclear since, as the priest in the church where I was baptized once teased me: “when you’re baptiz…

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By The Numbers: Jeb Opposes Francis on Climate Change at His Peril

…happening, or if it is, it’s natural causes, or they’re just not sure. The numbers attributing warming to human activity rise among moderates and liberals, of course, but they’re not going to vote for Jeb anyway. There is one number Bush might want to worry about, though: 85. That’s the percent of Hispanic Catholics who think climate change is a real problem: For a guy who’s been touting his potential to draw Spanish-speaking voters into the Repub…

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Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

…s copies of the book have sold for the past half century and it was ranked number 9 in the “Top 50 Books the Have Shaped Evangelicals” by Christianity Today, alongside works by C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Francis Schaffer, and Rick Warren. Her influence is well noted in her obituary by Kate Shellnutt at Christianity Today. Through Elliot’s book, evangelicals latched on to the deaths of these five young men, and their story became a galvanizin…

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The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

…itutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a reference to…

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What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

…commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection; the disproportionate number of Covid deaths in states run by Republican governors; this week’s shooting massacre in San Jose, Calif., and every other one like it; and, let’s see, what else? Well, feel free at the end of this piece to add your own examples. There are plenty more. All have in common the political concept that God divided the world between the elected and the unelected, that is, b…

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‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

…. Simply identifying as an atheist at first felt uncomfortable to me for a number of reasons. All of my family members remained Christian, so it was easier for me to tell them that I was “searching,” or at least agnostic, rather than atheist. Additionally, I wasn’t sure that the label applied to me. Finally, now, as a historian of religion, when I introduce myself to strangers, they inevitably ask me about my religious commitments. When I explain…

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Are You Rapture Ready?

…of a Broadway show. Jesus is about to make his big entrance only his final number will feature the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tom Evans, spokesman for Family Radio said their math for setting the return date came from a verse in Luke 17: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” According to Camping’s prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about…

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Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

…sque is gigantic, full of beautiful and elaborate designs, with an immense number of repetitions to them. The stairs and the escalators are deceiving, taking two for each floor in one tower and only one escalator per floor in another tower. I never did figure out which was which. I knew the fastest way up to the third floor from my hotel, but this was always early and therefore less chaotic. It also involved a wide ramp straight from the outer fro…

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Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

…hild, and his wife, Rheka, who have adopted or otherwise given a home to a number of girls and young women who have survived sometimes horrific abuse and neglect. “I’m just here to be here,” Heuertz would say apologetically from time to time during our visits in and around Kathmandu, as if showing up and being fully, lovingly present weren’t a robust enough mission. “I just wanted to come and support my friends, to show them I love them, and be he…

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Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

…believe in magic or spirits today, and it appears that they did so at the high point of so-called “modernity.” And contrary to what you might think, higher education levels do not directly result in disenchantment. Indeed, one might hazard the guess that education allows one to maintain more cognitive dissonance rather than less. Secularization and disenchantment are also not correlated. Moreover, it is easy to show that, almost no matter how you…

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