Religion Dispatches
…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…
Read More…tholics who are successfully leading a traditional Catholic family life, reports John Allen: The synod’s final report ‘should begin with hope rather than failures, because a great many people already do successfully live the Gospel’s good news about marriage,’ said the English-language group headed by Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto, warning against breeding a sense of ‘pastoral despair.’ However, one of the German bishops cautioned that holdin…
Read More…ea. In one parish, Latino/as are the saviors of the community, bringing in numbers (and I suspect dollars) to support a failing community. In the more substantially covered parish Latino/as are marginalized by Anglos in their community. One member goes so far as to question the need for mass in Spanish. The fact that the universality and diversity of Catholicism is the pathway to its deep unity is lost on this woman. The segment shows two churches…
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…na, recently wrote that the claim of 8,000 sexual minorities has little support in fact. Knight concluded, in a blog post titled Did Ghana register 8000 homosexuals? The facts behind the hype that: the real story is of a rather low-key workshop that has been sensationalized by the press, possibly with the collusion of a local doctor. The press reports are designed to create fear as are the unrepresentative group of Muslims claiming an imminent Sod…
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…e story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few things that make a society more vulnerable to trauma. “A society emerging from a major war, suffering from diminished economic r…
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…iage equality and advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in the public square. Cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop make it clear that the boundaries of a national settlement on gay rights remain fuzzy. As this vitally important conversation proceeds, let us not miss yet another opportunity to tell the story of religious advocacy, and not just religious opposition, with regard to the LGBTQ+ community….
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…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…
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…ents are of less and less importance to my students,” said Myers, who noted that millennials are instead looking for “sacramental moments in their own communities.” During recent Camino de Santiago pilgrimages with students, he noted, “sacramental devotions [were] less important than more informal prayer opportunities.” “In this most Catholic of countries, the masses are few, the churches locked, the clergy often nowhere to be found. For my studen…
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…56 percent of which are women and girls. A smaller, but still considerable number are victims of sex trafficking—essentially, forced prostitution. With increasing frequency, reports of sex trafficking rings in major U.S. cities appear in the media. In major hubs like Houston and New York City, stories about charges and convictions of homegrown trafficking cells shed light on just how widespread domestic trafficking is. Just this week, the website…
Read More…aid would get whatever formal treatment required, but that he would not support it. From a November 10 report in La Prensa (translation via Google). Yesterday some 50 representatives of the Evangelical Fellowship of Honduras asked the Congress to reject any initiative to promote marriage between same-sex couples… The Evangelical Fellowship rejects the proposal that emerges from the Lesbian and Gay Community… Pastors declared that they were not act…
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