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Accept Gays? Only If They Know Their Place

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…sor at Mercer University, recounts Elke’s story and some of the other heartbreaking stories of gays and lesbians crushed and torn by religious hatred in his review of the book in the latest issue of The Christian Century. As an evangelical Christian whose career has been spent in the South, I must say I find it scandalous that the most physically and psychologically dangerous place to be (or even appear to be) gay or lesbian in America is in the m…

Do Tea Partiers Use Religious Justification For Racial Rhetoric?

By Julie Ingersoll

…uage. This all occurred in a context in which people took these to be the true meanings of these stories. This exercise does more than show us just how wrong “they” were; it pushes us to recognize the degree to which our own readings of texts (whether those texts be the Bible, the Qu’ran, or the Constitution) can never be as certain as they seem. It’s not my point here to debate the “true meanings” of these texts; I guess that’s a task for believe…

Why 9/11 Changed Everything Nothing

By Paul Harvey

…ory of the Civil War? Or to the reillusionment of the faithful fighters of World War I? If so, then our stories of war, our “war on terrorism,” will simply return to shopworn themes of spiritual regeneration and a renewal of national innocence. If history repeats itself twice, then the first time, as Faust reminds us, was tragedy, and the second time might yet be too. If, on the other hand, we find other means beyond real and metaphorical war as a…

Blessed With a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch’s Spiritual Strivings

By Paul Harvey

…ives voice to a character who learned to sing hosannas on my knees, was corrupted by the feel of whiskers on her cheek, and now lives with slight consolations: it’s beefsteak when I’m working, whiskey when I’m dry, and sweet heaven when I die. Welch’s songs are shot through with characters whose lives of struggles are balanced with the desire to see Jesus, to read the Gospel pages. They want to see that my hobo soul will rise, or reach the Glory L…

“I’m a Creationist,” Says Former Times Tech Writer, Heffernan

By Michael Schulson

…s we tell are not inconsequential things. They matter. Sure, in the modern world we do have the freedom to choose our guiding stories. And, here in postmodernity, we do have theories that relativize and contextualize, making that choice seem arbitrary. But none of this means that, once we’ve chosen an idea, it exists in a vacuum, tickling our minds and having no effect on things like, say, funding for scientific research, or the rights of children…

When Children’s Literature is Not Defined by “Innocence”

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…re grafted into greater American civic acceptance through their children’s stories—especially those stories with overtones of suffering, exodus, and sacrifice—in modes that have long been part of the grand narratives of American religious history. I don’t say that to degrade those narratives or to promote them—but to notice how they are always with us, and how memory work is a practice, and a very complicated one. In the case of Jews, African Amer…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…They are told it’s for their own good, by people who actually believe the stories to be true. Having been told appalling, harmful stories, those children go on to behave in appalling and harmful ways—like when, in Book II, Augustine steals some pears. Some readers accuse Augustine of overreacting here, making a youthful indiscretion into a grand and lurid sin. But Augustine’s point is exactly that it wasn’t grand or interesting. It was small and…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…city of the Biblical account one of the most accurate history books in the world[.] “Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act.” (Psalm 37:5) Judaism Interpreted through Christian Eyes When it comes to scripture shared by Jews and Christians—the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament—many courses present the material primarily as a series of prophetic predictions about Jesus. A chart in one class titled “Jesus and the Genesis Flood” highligh…

Vandalism as Conversation-Starter

By Elizabeth Drescher

…tform, and responding with their own message of hope: “Like in many small, rural communities, teenagers in the area often struggle with nothing to do, with drinking, and so on,” said Broad of the likely culprits. “Some of the tagging was truly malicious,” he added. “The doors of the Roman Catholic church down the road were sprayed with ‘Satan’s House.’ Still, we wanted to respond as someone who cares, as someone who listens, even when the forum fo…

Pope Tweeted into Retirement

By Rachel Wagner

…gleaned from his recent praise of “silence” in the midst of the ceaseless rush of digital information, as expressed in his World Communications Day speech of 2012: “In our time, the Internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers—indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions,…