Religion Dispatches
…sing hajj visas. It has reported that it will take 10-12 business days. My trip is too soon to get my visa processed even if they still had it before the Berlin dates, and too late to process if I go to Berlin and try to get it done after I return. In other words, as the guy put it, either take your trip or get your hajj visa. Not much of a choice really. I mean, it’s not like comparing apples and oranges. So, today when the post office opens I wi…
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…Vowell’s amazing Assassination Vacation, where she talks about her various trips to places connected to the assassinations of different presidents. I had just finished reading some other funny road-trip books like Steve Almond’s Candyfreak, and all of a sudden it occurred to me that maybe I should get out of my stuffy office and hit the road, see what I could learn by visiting the places where these church/state cases I’d been teaching about for s…
Read More…ated by the RNC for members and their guests. An RNC spokesperson said the trip was not officially a committee trip, but is a “spiritual, historic journey through Israel” organized by the groups in concert with RNC faith director Chad Connelly. According to the official, who declined to be named, about 60 members RSVPd to attend, or 36% of the full committee. Lane’s Renewal Project made headlines during the 2008 Republican primary, when the group,…
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…a—also attended by Alaska state representative David Eastman. In fact, the round that determined who represented California at that first national tournament was between Eastman’s team and my brother’s, with Eastman winning. That first year, the national tournament was a significant event, with the final round taking place at the 1997 National Christian Home Educators Leadership Conference in front of 400 homeschool leaders from 44 states. By 2000…
Read More…ouisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is proposing education reforms based on the Florida model that includes public-private partnerships for charter schools, in which businesses would help fund on-site charter schools. The funding business would have a significant voice on the governing board and reserve half of the seats in the classrooms for children of employees. These efforts and others will be supported during the upcoming National School Choice…
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…other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon Hard…
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…es would talk to me and let me do interviews. There were times when I made phone calls to inmates’ family members to let then know that visiting times had changed, to save them a long trip to the prison. I also visited the families of inmates with pastors and other volunteers to bring food, sometimes a gift a child’s dad had made. I basically become part of the lives of the people whose lives I wanted to document. How did a project you undertook f…
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…he cancer that had crawled across his body, had lain in bed at home with a phone against his ear while my pastor, who had called him from the pulpit, pointed a cordless phone toward the congregation; we all wept and sang him love songs as he lay dying. These are uniquely evangelical experiences that shaped me, that will always be a part of me. I still long for this kind of community—the kind that journeys together through all the peaks and valleys…
Read More…Pope Francis is what the church always has taught. “It is held in the background, however, as a presupposition. In the foreground is placed the individual moral subject with his conscience, with his interior dispositions, with his personal responsibility,” which “is why it is not possible to formulate general regulations.” In an age when Christianity was dominant, he said, the focus was on objective truth: Is this person living according to church…
Read More…ilies New Ways Ministry, a Catholic group planning to hold a conversation around gender identity issues during the Pope’s visit to Philadelphia next month, was banned by church officials from holding their event in a local parish. St. John the Evangelist in downtown Philadelphia was also going to serve as a home base for Equally Blessed, but that group has been shut out too. The Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein notes: The news Tuesday follows…
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