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The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…s gay people from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will n…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…anaged to reconcile their spiritual values with voting for a man who in my mind epitomizes the imperial values Jesus challenged. I would write this book for a more-than-academic audience, with the aim of educating the general public about some basic assumptions regarding “religion” that most scholars take for granted. I guess this book would fall in the genre of texts dedicated to promoting religious literacy for a non-academic audience. Within th…

Women’s Liberation Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born

By Kathryn Joyce

…d. Feminism, she argued, in a paraphrase of the argument in her book The Feminist Mistake: The Radical Impact of Feminism on Church and Culture, is a multistage process that begins with feminism’s insistence on self-definition and self-determination, and ends with feminism’s declaration that women can interpret and decide for themselves who or what God is: a statement of theological relativity that threatens to undermine biblical literalism comple…

Even After an Obama Victory Reports of the Death of the Religious Right are Greatly Exaggerated

By Bill Berkowitz

…on surrounding the potential redundancy of the phrase ‘frozen tundra.’ The New York Times’ sports pages reported on Lake Superior State University’s eagerly awaited List of “Words Banished From the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness, 2003 edition,” which banished ‘frozen tundra’ for being redundant (missing the irony, perhaps, that this isn’t a word, it’s a phrase). LSSU’s 2004 edition, however, reinstated the phrase citin…

I Was Nearly Seduced by David Brooks’ Reasonable Analysis

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…rooks, on “empiricism.” What Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan and most economists share as economists is an intense interest in the way people behave economically, in the psychological motives (and yes, the faith) that drive certain choices. In the world of contemporary economics, according to David Brooks, there are two dominant models of analysis: number crunching and psychology. Greenspan was a number cruncher, says Brooks, and unfortunately, hu…

RD News Round-Up: October 27, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…ny are on the job. In a recent post at Talk2Action, Wilson writes that the new 10-minute video “features never-before publicly heard audio from Sarah Palin’s key church, the Wasilla Assembly of God and never-before publicly seen footage from Pastor John Hagee’s now-infamous ‘God Sent Hitler’ 2005 sermon, in which Hagee pantomimes a Nazi holding a rifle pointed at Jews. ++++++++++ Hagee Hears a Who-madgeddon For the few gifted enough to retain info…

RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

By Tom Davis

…ving in a land of gated communities, he didn’t see much of it. In a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, Warren admitted that widows and orphans were not on his radar. He admitted to being confused as to how he had ignored the power of the Bible’s many verses on the poor. Having vowed to change all that, he ultimately contributed vast sums toward HIV prevention, medical education, and microfinancing for poor communities in many countries…

Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think

By Seth Sanders

…e of Israel was even desirable? If it is true, as Marc Tracy writes in the New York Times, that “[i]n 2024, anti-Zionism is the closest thing organized Judaism has to heresy,” then for most of Jewish history it may have been closer to the opposite. For 2000 years Jewish prayer has hoped ardently that the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) would soon be redeemed by God and led by His Messiah; some even made pilgrimage to visit or dwell with others in t…

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

By Joel Pitney

…is almost entirely supportive of LGBT members and clergy, and there are many, many reconciling congregations. You’re in a much more conservative area of the country and of the church, and I’m curious to know what the general attitude towards LGBT people is? Do you find that there are more supportive people in the general membership than in the leadership? My congregation has been very supportive. A small number of people chose to leave. Some of t…

Refusal of Interracial Couple Shows How Slippery the Slope of LGBTQ Refusal Really Is

By Heron Greenesmith

…ople in urban areas are married to someone of a different race, only 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Mississippi are married to someone of a different race, the lowest percentage in the country. And the Mississippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally)….