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Religion in Tension on World AIDS Day

By Susan Henking

…ltations on AIDS/HIV and Islam in South Africa sponsored by Islamic Relief International. The Sangha Metta Project brings Buddhist monks together to work on both prevention and care. And President-elect Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Global Summit on AIDS and the Church, sponsored by evangelical Christian Rick Warren, that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that ‘if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.’ But it…

Martin Luther & the Mass Media

By Svend White

…nailed to a church door in Wittenberg in 1517) from a local dispute to an international cause celebre was the involvement of the printing press that had been invented a half century earlier. To say that Luther’s cause was helped by this new media is to almost lie by understatement, as the singularly wide distribution of his tracts utterly changed the terms of debate and put the religious establishment of his day on the popular defensive for perha…

King as Inspiration, Not Guide

By William D. Hart

…ican “principalities and powers” for oppressing the poor and the weak, for buying “the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes.” This is powerful inspiration for those of us who follow King. But he cannot be our guide because our circumstances are different. The successes, uneven results, and failures of strategy and tactics that the King-led movement experienced are now part of the circumstances under which we must choose and act. For…

Purpose Driven Politics: Rick Warren’s Civil Service

By Bill Berkowitz

…ose Driven Network Summit organized, “to create The PEACE Coalition, a new international alliance of churches, businesses, ministries, universities, and other institutions.” P.E.A.C.E. is an acronym for: Promote reconciliation; Equip servant leaders; Assist the poor; Care for the sick; and Educate the next generation. “For the past four years, thousands of members of Saddleback Church have been testing prototypes of the P.E.A.C.E. Plan around the…

Will Women Priests Change the Church?

By Mary E. Hunt

…re. The Origins of the Fight for Women’s Equality in the Church St. Joan’s International Alliance, a suffrage group founded in London in 1911, was the first to raise the ordination question. According to Belgian writer Anne Marie Pelzer, the Alliance put to the Holy Father its first official request for women to become deacons (1961), then for lay men and women to be present at the Council, as observers and experts (1962). In 1963, it presented a…

This is Not a Religion Column: The Audacity of Compromise…

By Jeff Sharlet

…ly branding Rwanda the first officially “Purpose-Driven nation,” after his international bestseller, The Purpose-Driven Life. The US government has fallen in line, pledging federal “faith-based” funding to augment Warren’s freelance foreign policy, which emphasizes Rwanda’s transformation (or, perhaps, conversion?) through small-scale capitalism and personal responsibility. Obama, meanwhile, has pledged to expand Bush’s Faith-Based Initiatives pro…

RD News Round-Up—September 29, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…ulation. In 2006 Dobson even head-butted Cizik in the press for supporting international regulations of emissions, calling his views ‘anti-capitalistic and [having] an underlying hatred for America.’ And who will Cizik be voting for come November 4? Unclear. Obama doesn’t have the experience all of us would like. I’m not in Washington to be an advocate for the Republican or the Democratic Party; that’s not my calling. I’m not an ideologue. I do wi…

This is not a Religion Column: Biblical Capitalism

By Jeff Sharlet

…. They did. Vereide died in 1969, but his organization—known in his day as International Christian Leadership, in ours as the Fellowship Foundation or the Family—still prospers. In a recent survey of 360 evangelical leaders—not preachers but politicians and businesspeople—Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay found that a plurality named the Fellowship one of the most influential religious groups in Washington. “There is no other organiza…

“The Call” Warns of Antichrist Legislation in California and Beyond

By Sarah Posner

…we’re going to return to our wedding vows.” Engle and his cofounder of the International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Kansas City, evangelist Mike Bickle, insist that continual prayer is required for this covenantal relationship to be restored in preparation for Jesus’ return. Bickle said, “God wants to build a global house of prayer before Jesus returns,” and Engle called it “a global army of prayer in the last days.” “Do you believe America can cha…

The Sacramental American Day of Thanks

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ncoln) and its sacred shrines (cemeteries at Gettysburg and Arlington, any number of memorials on the Washington Mall, and more recently, Oklahoma City, the Pentagon and Ground Zero in New York). Perhaps most important, the US civil religion boasts its own calendar of “secular” holidays. These days, actually constituting a quasi-sacred calendar, span the entire calendar year: New Year’s Day, the King Holiday, President’s Day, Memorial Day, the Fou…