Religion Dispatches
…aker for Exodus who has been with the ministry for ten years, since she was 17, says she understands that. “Time will reveal as we begin this new venture,” she told Religion Dispatches. “Alan coming out with this apology and this move is already an enormous step. We’re saying that gay people matter and where we’ve caused them harm we’re going to own that and work to end that pain.” When asked if a “safe and welcoming” place would include those…
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…someone’s name was Vic. Each letter in his name is also a Roman numeral. V=5, I=1, C=100. Using gematria, we find that Vic’s number is 5+1+100, or 106. So whose name adds up to 666? Most biblical scholars believe the beast was the Roman emperor Nero. Nero’s title in Latin was Caesar Nero. The equivalent in Greek, the language of Revelation, was Kaisar Neron. When transliterated into Hebrew, the Greek name became Resh, Samekh, Qoph, Nun, Vav, Resh…
Read More…d that as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s…
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…al to a Canadian mother (who had come to India as a Christian missionary in 1946) and an English-Burmese father who reared him as an evangelical Christian, in 1989 at the age of 34, Mendies was found guilty of “proselytizing” (in this case, placing bibles in Nepali hotel rooms) and spent six months in Kathmandu’s Central Jail, where he shared a cell with 17 other prisoners. Nepal’s intensely complicated political heritage has been aptly described…
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…udio was opened by a longtime editor at Glamour, Suze Yalof Schwartz. In a phone interview, Yalof Schwartz said that she decided to open the studio when she couldn’t easily find a place to learn meditation. I asked Yalof Schwartz how Unplug differed from the dozens of Buddhist centers that immigrants and hippies have sprinkled across the hills of Southern California. “Meditation is a science,” she replied. “It’s literally build[ing] your brain. Yo…
Read More…Soros in the crosshairs, not unlike what we saw with Father Coughlin in the 1930s or the John Birch Society in the 1950s. Byron Williams, a Beck acolyte who recently engaged in a shoot-out with police on his way to kill “people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU,” shares his hero’s hatred of Soros and other “progressives.” Given the more than 40 percent of Jews self-identify as liberal, this hatred targets us. Beck doesn’t care — a…
Read More…t “morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan,” lives in a “one of a kind,” 19-chimneyed mansion in the heart of Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood conservatively valued at $14.3 million. And he is waited on by three nuns who live in a nearby coach house—very Downton Abbey. • Seattle Archbishop James Sartain, who is currently in charge of making sure that the naughty nuns of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious don’t spend too much time wor…
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…he [imagined] danger through aggression and power.” As Beinart argues, the number of American Jews who act out of fantasied oppression is declining. But their political strength remains much greater than their numbers. Yet curiously Lerner, the professional psychologist, downplays this and the other psychological wellsprings of support for militant Zionism. Instead he focuses time and again on compassion for the very real historical sufferings of…
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…to raise capital for Heritage USA. He was found guilty of fraud in October 1989 and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. He only served five. After being released from prison in 1994, Bakker wrote I Was Wrong (1996), in which he renounced the prosperity gospel and apologized for preaching a false message. Then he turned his gaze to another lucrative arena: the apocalypse industry. Here, Bakker has found a niche. As he put it on the show, his…
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…for myself, my family, and colleagues. So I’ve been trying to draft a short 800-word article for Religion Dispatches, as my attempt to make sense of this current moment, not because I chose this as an anthropological project, but here I am. Here I am listening to Trump’s transition team drop words like Muslim registry or that there is a precedent for internment camps in American history. The news that the KKK has been dropping their newsletter off…
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