Religion Dispatches
…other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Being loosed” could happen because the husband left because the wife was at church too much, they divorced, or the husband died. Others were in horrible marriages, often with physical and emotional abuse involved. Some never married. Yet the chu…
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…his congregation, and to the region. CMRI expanded around the world in the 1970s and 1980s, opening churches, seminaries and convents in Canada, Europe and Australia. But Schuckardt was ousted from the leadership of his own congregation in 1984 amid allegations of sexual impropriety and administrative incompetence. The CMRI moved its headquarters to Omaha, Nebraska, under a new bishop. In many ways CMRI exhibits a pattern found in the more extrem…
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…g to identify potentially radical organizations and individuals. The Green Number, or Numéro Vert, is a private telephone hotline in France where family and friends can report someone they fear may become radicalized. And in the U.K., Prevent is a program that essentially creates ‘trigger warnings’ for teachers and institutions to report the potential for radicalization. I do not mean to condemn or even criticize these programs, merely to point ou…
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…six days was unusually long, or that a lengthy gap elapsed between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2-3. Another teacher’s resource materials included a religious tract claiming that NASA had discovered a missing day in time that proved Joshua 10’s story of the sun standing still. One district’s slideshow on archaeology’s verification of the Exodus story concluded with this observation: Sad to say mainstream anti-God media do not portray these true facts in the…
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…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…
Read More…t’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Philadelphia after Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter tried to extract a six-figure sum from the Churc…
Read More…‘family shame’ and violence Reuters’ Alisa Tang reported this week on the number of LGBT people in “largely patriarachal and conservative” Asian countries who are flocking to cities and increasingly leaving their home countries to escape the “family shame factor” and live more freely. Activists say including sexual orientation and gender identity in laws, policies and programs to prevent violence against women and children would reduce family vio…
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…our own motives and aspiring to reduce harm and suffering for the greatest number of those at risk.” Ven. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, another notable teacher and translator in the Theravada tradition, disagreed vehemently with Bhikkhu Bodhi’s position, writing a lengthy letter to Inquiring Mind in which he outlined various objections. “The common view—that murderous force is an unfortunate but necessary last resort—is what has caused so much money, time a…
Read More…en for thinking that Reagan was God, or at least a patron saint, given the number of times he was name-checked in the debate. Mostly it went like this. The candidates did talk about hot-button social issues, but they held back from claiming religious sponsorship of their ideas. It’s not clear if they’d gotten the memo about not antagonizing religiously unaffiliated voters, or if they simply didn’t see much advantage in differentiating themselves a…
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…on average, 422 people in the US ask Google “Why did God make me ugly?” and 103 ask “Why did God make me black?” The most common God-related question, asked over 25,000 times per month in the US, is “Who created God?,” followed by that old Job-ian classic, “Why does God allow suffering?” But we should be careful here; Google search data offers a skewed sliver of insight into the full range of human motivation and behavior. The population of people…
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