Religion Dispatches
…offense to a series of marriages she performed for same-gender couples in California during the brief period in 2008 when such unions were legal in the state. The trial will take place under the auspices of the Redwoods Presbytery, the local church governing body for Spahr’s ministry, at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Napa, California, starting August 24. Janie Spahr is a grandmother with a shock of short gray hair and piercing blue eyes that si…
Read More…sques are monuments to terrorism.” The sign is from a protest in Temecula, California, which is over 2700 miles from the World Trade Center site. Protests have also greeted another proposed mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and it became something of an issue in the recent Republican gubernatorial primary. While campaigning, Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey (who lost the primary) said: “Now, you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion,…
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…ming behind. But it is a ceremony, not a religion—not yet. When I moved to California in 1974 after the Wounded Knee occupation the year before, the sweat lodge was already starting to spread from those origins. But I could not find a place to sweat for the first few months. Eventually some Paiute friends built one in their yard in a Southern California urban area, and within a few months, dozens of Indians and non-Indians started to attend. By 19…
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…te locked up, albeit not in the 33 official state prisons. Never mind that California voters passed Prop 30 to restore cuts to schools and colleges, not to fund yet more incarceration. Part of Brown’s devilish deal involves making use of a private prison facility, one owned by notorious Corrections Corporation of America, but with unionized state prison guards getting the custody jobs. Even in this deep blue state, the lucrative incarceration busi…
Read More…er to quality for $5.1 million in federal Title X funding for its Southern California clinics. LifeSiteNews reports that it was tipped off by anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson (who’s the subject of the anti-Planned Parenthood movie Unplanned) that Obria CEO Kathleen Eaton Bravo met recently with officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who made it clear that under the terms of the grant, “all CA [California] Obria medical…
Read More…Guy Erwin, a professor of religion and history who will lead the Southwest California Synod. From GLAAD: Because he is openly gay and partnered, Dr. Erwin did not seek ordination in the ELCA when he was completing seminary. Instead, he completed a PhD in Lutheran history and spent most of his career as a teacher of Lutheran history. He met his partner Rob Flynn while he was studying for this PhD at Yale University. He and Rob are members of St. Ma…
Read More…nal under the equal protection clause. As a result the ruling on Prop 8 in California has no standing, because the court has nullified the appellate court decision. For many, this is a wonderful day, but for conservative religious groups, it is one more proof of “persecution.” Groups who defended Prop 8—such as the Alliance for Defense of Marriage—are taking the ground that Prop 8 is still the law of California, while other religious leaders at th…
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…fter while he was staying at the Forest Home Conference Center in Southern California. While hiking and praying there in the San Bernardino Mountains, Graham decided to set aside Templeton’s challenge, to banish his own intellectual doubts, and simply to “preach the gospel.” He did just that, descending the mountain to conduct his famous Los Angeles revival campaign of 1949. Abetted by prodigious advance work, which would become the hallmark of Gr…
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…onstitutional changes in the final days of the campaign. And the shadow of California’s Proposition 8 — when voters rejected marriage equality in the state in 2008 after a win seemed likely — looms large… Until recently, the leaders of Ireland’s Catholic Church had done little more than pass a formal declaration in December opposing the referendum. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, took a more forceful tone early last week, which he said…
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…ans were delving into what was known as the gospel of Christian Atheism, a California dance band re-named themselves, and the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead. The name was intended to disturb. Language employed as undertow to wash away cultural carcinogens: the strangling of mystery through control, convenience and predictability. Civilization as technique and death-denying would scoff at this nonsensical combination: grateful dead. And yet thos…
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