Religion Dispatches
…ions made in Pink Smoke. Early on in the film, Fresen narrates how, as a seminary professor, she was allowed to teach preaching to seminarians but was forbidden to preach herself during the Catholic liturgy. She then revisits her realization that the passage in canon law that excludes women from the priesthood is “the same as the apartheid laws…” That Church law, she tells viewers, is “just the same as saying only white people can live in the citi…
Read More…, he can’t be trusted? Or if you can’t trust him, he must be a Muslim? In any case, Obama strained mightily to placate the likes of Graham and Brody while he was campaigning for the presidency. His “faith outreach” played up his faith in Christ, but these conservatives, for whom faith outreach has a cramped, limited meaning, obviously weren’t listening (or “trusting” him). Obama’s defenders will point out his Christian cred, even if he hasn’t (sca…
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…and Muslims worship the same God, Wheaton has initiated proceedings to terminate her claiming that she has violated the school’s statement of faith that she, like all faculty, had signed. It was recently revealed that Wheaton Provost Stanton Jones called the remark itself “innocuous,” and that other Wheaton faculty who recently expressed solidarity with Islam have been let off the hook with much simpler clarifications. Many commentators, includin…
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…There I concluded: There is no evidence that higher church attendance has any mitigating effect on racist attitudes; if anything, the opposite is true…. For White evangelical Protestants, holding racist views is nearly four times as predictive of White evangelical Protestant identity among frequent church attenders as among infrequent church attenders (White Too Long, 176-177). Among White evangelicals, PRRI research confirms that frequent church…
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…cking Eddie Long! You’re wrong!” She got over a million views. So what’s coming in are a huge number of statements. Many of them are typically homophobic, “God is not mocked,” “you’re going to hell” and all of that. But there are a great many people saying, “No.” And this is down the line. A white former Pentecostal wrote about how homophobia ruined his youth. He said he went to Lee College, which is one of the most famous and earliest white Pente…
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…nones”), and of that, the numbers trended upwards among 18-29 year olds. Many news outlets covered the overall trend of millennials leaving the church in connection with the uptick of the religiously unaffiliated, but ignored the racial subtext of the millennials who chose to stay, and also were black. In all fairness, the public narrative supports why mainstream media was slow to cover this. Peter Breinart in his essay “Breaking Faith” in the The…
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…ky, [Igor] Ponkin and Mrs [Vera] Abramenkova. And there is no evidence of any hatred or enmity on our part other than this expert examination. For this reason, if it is honourable and just, the court must rule the evidence inadmissible because it is not a strictly scientific or objective text but a filthy, lying bit of paper from the medieval days of the inquisition. There is no other evidence that remotely hints at a motive. The prosecution is re…
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…life. A publicly recognized, government sponsored observation of the complex religious and non-religious American landscape that doesn’t invite rigid polarization might well be something for which we could all give thanks… in whatever way each of us might do that….
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…ts are more likely to say that they have no religion than their parents or grandparents’ generations. Many church leaders are concerned about their losses and what in their view will result in a general decline in social and personal morals. Others rationalize their losses as essentially a culling of the religious herd. Now, they say, we’re down to people who really believe, instead of “cultural Christians” who don’t adhere to Christian beliefs. M…
Read More…emacists. It is a belief system that provides its members with a religious basis for racism and an ideology that condones violence against non-Aryans.” If I were to do some hair-trigger analysis here, I might think Tony Perkins was defending neo-Nazis, Aryan Nation, and the Klan. Maybe Perkins should have thought about that a bit before he accused Southers of maligning Christians….
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