Religion Dispatches
…2010.” ++++++++++ American Family Association Glides into Fourth Decade End-of-the-year fundraising pitches are commonplace in the world of nonprofit organizations. In a recent “Personal Note,” the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder and chairman of the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association, thanked his supporters and extended an invitation to them to become one of 100,000 contributors to the organization’s work. In many of these appeals,…
Read More
…uch like the atheist movement, the interfaith movement seeks to build inter-group understanding, encourage critical thinking, and end religiously-based sociological and political exclusivism. The fundamental misunderstanding that many atheists have is that they imagine the interfaith movement as uninterested in combating religious totalitarianism and solely existing to maintain religious privilege—as an excuse to show that religion, in its many di…
Read More
…ermines whether a researcher believes the earth is six thousand or four-and-a-half billion years old. Who can be sure, anyway? Ham encourages students to ask their teachers “Were you there?” when those teachers suggest that the earth is very old, or that dinosaurs predated humans. As Ham would say, God, of course, was there and told Moses what happened “in the beginning.” That’s the “answer.” Professionally constructed dioramas in Ham’s Creation M…
Read More
…significant investment resources, built through long years of serving well-to-do constituents. Many of these schools also own impressive buildings on coveted plots of land. According to the Association of Theological Schools, denominational (a category roughly equivalent to mainline) Protestant seminaries derived 37 percent of their revenue from investments and depreciation in 2013, a substantially higher percentage than either Roman Catholic or…
Read More
…faith members’ influence in recent elections. Following George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, to take one example, evangelical outlets breathlessly reported on how evangelical voters had been critical to Bush’s victory. And four years ago, many of those same outlets touted evangelical support for Mitt Romney against President Obama’s successful re-election bid. None of this commentary sought to minimize evangelical participation in the elections—q…
Read More
…ce (CPAC), clad in a coat and tie paired with American flag shorts and flip-flops, holding the US Constitution in one hand and a magic wand in the other. At the individual level, a plethora of hats, t-shirts, bumper stickers, digital art (often featuring Jesus and Trump), tattoos, and, of course, Trump’s “God Bless the USA”-branded Bible flooded into public spaces. This explosion of symbolic material was the result of the energy unleashed by the B…
Read More…e community are such unwieldy and bumpersticker unfriendly phrases as “same-sex attraction,” “same-sex intercourse,” “sodomy,” and “unnatural vice.” (Didn’t Don Johnson star in that?) The dark horse in the new name calling sweepstakes is my favorite one, though: “anti-Christian.” All those pro-gay straight Christians are really going to be shocked to learn that their support of their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters puts them at odds with — we…
Read More
…a tireless researcher and lecturer who promotes the diaconate as an inside-the-box strategy for changing the Church, has parsed the various arguments and has recently published translations of some of the scholarly articles that ground this work. According to Dr. Zagano: “While ITC member Cipriano Vagaggini published research on the diaconate in an Italian journal in 1974, the ITC didn’t produce its own work on that subject until about 1997. Alon…
Read More…in my preparations. I count myself among the scoffers of second coming date-setting since Jesus himself said we won’t know the date or the time of his return. Evans is prepared with his answer to me and others who laugh off their efforts: “Sadly, only eight people survived the flood in Noah’s time,” he said. “The number of people that are going to be saved is going to be very small.” All this rapture talk reminds me of a morning I spent in the cha…
Read More…sizable number of bishops believe that the preparatory document is all doom-and-gloom and doesn’t do enough to celebrate the sizable number of Catholics 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 Car…
Read More