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American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

…ken a much more adversarial stance to LGBT acceptance. However, increasing numbers of evangelical churches are accepting LGBT individuals as members. This development is not without its opponents, however. Many evangelical organizations—most significantly colleges, universities and seminaries—are mobilizing to retain their “religious right” to discriminate against LGBT individuals. More than 30 evangelical higher education institutions have petiti…

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Rise of Episcopal Village

…s shift in thinking are myriad and have only intensified since 2008 when a number of studies indicated that for the first time in US history, less than 50 percent of Americans classified themselves as “Christian.” Such shifts in church decline have been documented in the Church of England (UK) for decades. As reported by the Rev. Steve Hollinghurst, Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture, the Sheffield Centre, Children’s Sunday school…

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Bush Has Helped the Scarecrow of American Religion

…e to our concerns. As religious progressive voices are getting louder, the caricature of religion has to fade away and we can begin having more intelligent conversations at a popular level about the role of religion in public life. We still have a way to go in terms of putting theory into practice. A recent collections of essays about the religious left fails to include any Muslim voices (disclosure: I know several of the contributors and have muc…

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When Corporations are “Persons” Under the Law: The Real Problem With Health Care

…ate about health care reform for the past several months. In short, health care is about the care of people. But our legal system is organized to care for, and to protect, corporations as if they were people. A business thus has the same rights and protections that a person does. This is a system tailor-made for plutocracy. And plutocracy is what bedevils any and every attempt at aggressive, and therefore meaningful, institutional reform. This sub…

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Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

…e that sends to U.S. Catholics, who are still struggling to understand why Cardinal Bernard Law remains on the Congregation for Bishops in Rome, helping to decide episcopal appointments worldwide? Cardinal Rigali also sits on that influential Vatican congregation. If rumors are true, Rigali will soon be replaced and sent to Rome. (He’s 76, one year past the mandatory retirement age.) A credible successor will be key to restoring the trust of Phila…

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Obstacles for Secularists

…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…

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The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

…the Grateful Dead collectively formed an intentionally itinerant community numbering in the tens of thousands, with their own customs, vernacular, art, and economy. In his explanation of the lure of the Grateful Dead to thousands of Deadheads around the country, Garcia ruminated, “maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.” Indeed, the promise of a great American adventure animated Deadheads to undertake an annual pilgrimage across th…

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Missing the Anger for the Shoes

…feces smeared all over their floors and carpets, although I’m sure a great number of non-Muslims appreciate these artifacts from guests’ shoes. As mentioned previously, shoes are also used to discipline people. Belt-whuppins are difficult when men’s traditional garb does not include belts. Shoes/slippers/etc. are far more common. They are used to help “enlighten” insouciant, arrogant, oblivious, destructive, or otherwise socially maladjusted indiv…

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The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

…han reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any number of manifestations, from a community like Iona to the shelves of New Age bookstores. Bradley argues that although the idea of a historical Celtic Church may be an exercise in “wishful thinking, romantic nostalgia and the projection of all kinds of dreams about what should and might be,” it’s also a “vehicle through which people have chased their dreams… of deeper spir…

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Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

…atemala (what were called “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam), and camps for Nicaraguan Contras. Today, in the aftermath of wars started by Bush and Cheney (also supported by Robertson), these might seem trivial in scale. Nevertheless in the 1980s allies of Reagan, funded illegally through the Iran-Contra connection and related schemes, were carrying out sadistic massacres in parts of countries they considered to be too leftist. Congressional Democrat…

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