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Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…sponded: “Exactly! Which shows how arbitrary and self-contradictory racial categories can be. Many consider Jews ‘white’ and accuse them of having ‘white privilege.’ But if Jesus is beyond racial categories, why aren’t other Jews? And what about Egyptians? And Greeks? Who gets to decide?” Here, both Metaxas and his interlocutor fail to appreciate that “Jews” doesn’t imply a homogeneous “racial” category. The claim that Jews are “white” or even “mo…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…nts during the progressive era. They were focused on issues of crime in Chicago, sanitation, temperance, and in all kinds of moral reform efforts. It’s clear from Moody to Billy Sunday to Aimee Semple McPherson to Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell, that to believe that Jesus is coming at any moment does not make you less active or less involved in your culture. They say over and over and over again that this is not the case. We just haven’t heard them…

Obama’s Gay Marriage Support Shocks Black Church

By Anthea Butler

…interesting crossroads for the relationship between the president and African-American churches in the 2012 election. The prevailing narrative in the media is that black churches are wholesale against same-sex marriage. From the 2004 elections to Proposition 8, this narrative has dominated, despite the fact that there is significant support from African Americans in and outside of the church for same-sex marriage. Media outlets portrayed the rece…

Religious Leaders On Anti-Muslim Frenzy: “Silence Is Not An Option”

By Sarah Posner

…seminated to millions of Americans through churches, synagogues, and political campaigns. Mattson lamented the lack of resources to respond to those sorts of distortions about Islam, but, she added, “it really shouldn’t be only our responsibility. There are so many so-called ‘experts’ about Islam [on television] but these are people who have no expertise, no academic credentials, no true institutional representation.” Mattson — singling out televi…

Elaine Howard Ecklund Wants to Dispel Myths Surrounding Religious Resistance to Science

By Sammy Feldblum

…it’s made it into a Democrat[ic] issue. I think that’s quite dangerous, because that doesn’t capture our whole national context. We need both Democrats and Republicans on board. To some extent—this is not entirely true—faith and politics correlate in some communities. So you’ve got to be very careful of that if you want to reach into these communities. You’ve got to depoliticize it. Our research also shows that you’ve got to reframe climate chang…

Conservative Hardliners at Synod Prompt Question: “What Are We Doing Here?”

By Patricia Miller

…ument 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 Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto, warning against breeding…

Exclusion is Causing Great Harm: A Conversation With Suspended UMC Pastor Rev. Cynthia Meyer

By Joel Pitney

…re deeply committed, and prayerfully working so hard. There may be limits around how long we can keep up that kind of fight while being excluded. The next couple of years are really significant in whether people will stay, and whether the church will remain one church. In the United Methodist Church, like any Christian denomination, there’s a lot of time and energy being spent on attracting more young people. How does the church’s stance on homose…

Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…and to enter the world of ideas is powerful. In 2009 a Wahabbi-funded publication called “The 500 Most Influential Muslims” was published. Nice and glossy, more than 200 pages, with the entire text also online, and given away free in so many places I cannot count them. Propaganda for sure. My shaykh said to me, I see you made it into the book. I told him I do not need the recognition of the particular parties involved, including the neo-Orientalis…

How Religion Shapes (or Doesn’t) Our Views on Public Issues

By Daniel Schultz

…they’re getting the message—-and ignoring it. Which brings us to the political implications. They’re pretty simple. First: multiply .18 by .26. That should give you (digging for iTouch calculator) 4%. That’s the number of people who can be persuaded on religious grounds to preserve reproductive rights. Common ground on this subject does not work. The best you can hope for is to change the subject, and we all know how well that worked during the he…

The Messiah is Not Coming

By Peter Laarman

…lification, apart from the first. That one is plain for all to see in the scary numbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” rea…