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Megachurch Pastor: We’re “American Al Qaeda” for Opposing Homosexuality

By Tom Bartlett

…time in our conversation, Chandler lowered his booming voice. The gays are best discussed in hushed tones. Like Chandler, Giglio said homosexuality was not a focus of his ministry. But notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say that his views had evolved since the 1990s. He didn’t say that he no longer thought gays and lesbians were hell-bound. He didn’t say that the dreaded homosexual agenda had ceased to be a threat to these great United States. H…

Conservatives, Messianic Jews, and the Jews

By Sarah Posner

…ited for Israel and other Christian Zionist groups “the Jews’ and Israel’s best friends in the world,” also tried to blame liberals, not Messianic Jews, for challenges to Judaism. “For 40 years I have argued that Jews for Jesus pose little or no danger to Jewish survival,” Prager wrote. “We Jews should be preoccupied with all the Jews for Nothing, the Jews for anti-Zionism, the Jews for radical Leftism.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again h…

Reza Aslan’s Viral Fox News Interview Reveals More Than Just Christian Privilege

By Jeffrey Scholes

…tates. Safi is right, but there’s another aspect of privilege being demonstrated here that plagues scholars of religion in particular. There may be a deep distrust of academics held by some Americans, but organic chemistry professors aren’t asked to state their personal biases before speaking. Cultural anthropologists have a long history of grappling with the insider/outsider problem, but it’s more of a methodological/hermeneutical issue—is it tr…

A far-right protestor wears a MAGA tophat with a grim expression.

Conservative Evangelicals Aren’t Hypocrites, They’re Sadists

By Daniel Schultz

…h a rabid culture warrior like Mike Pence in the #2 role. But probably the best evidence for somebody like this would be the ICE raids in Mississippi last week. Here’s Trump the authoritarian carrying out his promise to keep them safe—and the result is a terrorized, deflated community. People notice that kind of thing, especially when their church is called on to assist the victims. And it may never work! All the evidence indicates that there’s a…

Catholic Healthcare Is Not the Enemy

By Frances Kissling

…er the “gotcha” is believed. The past couple of years have produced a fair number of examples of a similar mindset on my side: we’re right, they’re wrong and the end justifies the means. Significant loss of access to abortion, the success of efforts to stigmatize providers, and the recent attacks on family planning are frightening us and contributing to the desire to destroy the demon. Recent events in the small town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma high…

First Congregational UCC, Ripon Wisconsin

Cheese State Reality Check: On The Wisconsin Idea and the Social Gospel

By Daniel Schultz

…tian co-religionists. White Evangelical Christians voted for Trump in huge numbers in a large part because they were fearful that they were ‘losing’ their country and they placed whiteness and nationalism over the Gospel. One of the most important task before us is to come up with a vision for Wisconsin and for the nation that is inclusive of all people and is more compelling than the one that is in power today. What world are we dreaming of and h…

Václav Havel: Democracy as Spiritual Discipline

By Peter Montgomery

…icians have a moral obligation to call their followers to be true to their best selves rather than pander to or inflame their followers’ worst instincts: Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It’s just that it’s incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed — as though it does not know what to rely on, where to begin, where or how to find meaningful outlets. In suc…

Raising Children the Right Way

By Jeffrey Feldman

…bad behavior, but an opportunity to express love. According to Dobson, the best chance to communicate comes after an episode where the parent has physically hurt the child: For this reason, parents should not dread or shrink back from confrontations with their children. These occasions should be anticipated as important events, because they provide the opportunity to convey verbal and nonverbal messages to the boy or girl that cannot be expressed…

Vigil Planned in Wake of Suicide by 17-Year-Old
Gay Mormon

By Joanna Brooks

…After his death, students at his Ogden-area high school wore their Sunday best to school to remember him. A local United Church of Christ is donating the candles for the vigil. Organizer Marian Edmonds, pastor of City of Hope Church in Salt Lake City and organizer of the OUTReach resource center in Ogden, will staff a table at the event to recruit mentors to help work with LGBT young people to prevent suicide. And Mormons are volunteering to spe…

How Should We Speak of Unspeakable Evil?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…This is not a banal story at all; it is unspeakable. And it is not a story best told in court, Arendt concluded. The United Nations created a new word—genocide—to try to capture what was clearly perceived to be a new kind of horror that had been unleashed on the world. It was not simply that the body counts in the course of two world wars had grown unimaginable, and it was not the fact of indiscriminate killing technology either. It was more the f…