Religion Dispatches
…of aging priests and clerics. The people of God and their money are going away, if they haven’t already. By putting the emphasis on the office of the priesthood, the Pope has ensured that the future of the Catholic Church will be in futile attempts at attempting to restore its evaporating moral authority. The Church will not be able to adequately insure its clergy with any reputable insurance agency against malpractice; educational institutions fo…
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…lic model) sets them apart. How long will this trend continue, and in what ways will it develop over the coming years? One of the drivers of this effort is related to the desires of younger Christians to live and work in urban areas. But with the influx of mostly younger and white members, what happens to the city, and the Christian voice that remains? 5. Urban Ministry Goes Mainstream There is a long history of urban churches and ministries in th…
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…a fundamental right. We are allowed to speak our minds. But bigotry will always exist—there will always be a certain amount of prejudice, and I don’t think you can eradicate that. What I wanted to do was address some of that prejudice, the misinformation that gets put out there. You can talk about and think about Muslims as you want, but you can’t stop Muslims from building a mosque. You can hate Muslims from the comfort of your house, or publicly…
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…more effective if it were honest. And perhaps that would have lessened the number of death threats and other vile correspondences she has received. Second, others have said that she deserved the criticism for its political harm, that this hurts the Democratic party. Perhaps, but that doesn’t make much sense either, because the manufactured outrage made it worse. If a Democratic leader had privately contacted her and said, “Ilhan, you have to clari…
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…rop up the sad and subdued crowd by saying: But we also know that God is always in control. You know, part of the thing—part of the problem with this campaign is we’ve been painted in an unfavorable and unfaithful light. We’ve been put in a hole, if you will. And it reminds me of a passage in Psalms 40. I waited patiently for the Lord. That’s what we’ve got to do. And he inclined it to me, heard my cry, brought us out of a horrible pit out of clay…
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…ormal theological belief or conviction. However, they are prophetic in the way that the Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan imagines prophets in the his classic work The Mysticism of Sound and Music, where he writes, “In fact, music excels religion, for music raises the soul of man even higher than the so-called external form of religion… That is why in ancient times, the greatest prophets were great musicians.” Members of the Grateful Dead in S…
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…es—affirming and not—have inquired about holding screenings and hopes that number will continue to grow. He believes that seeing and hearing these stories can change people’s hearts. He says he was changed in the process of making the movie; getting to know some of the missionaries and IHOP staff as people made it harder to think of them as simply “evil fundamentalists.” And, he says, that after spending so much time with missionary Joanna Watson,…
Read More…of increased religious influence on American society is just a cataclysm away. Religion’s saliency for political machinations, cultural inspiration, and social movements is a separate reality from the growing number of nones. Both need coverage. But the Gallup data raises questions that I’ve rarely seen addressed in recent years. What does faith look and feel like in flyover country? As a cub reporter, I wrote about the greying mainline, their in…
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…ates, Talento declares that women control access to sex. If they “value it cheaply”—meaning, sex outside of marriage—no man would ever want to marry them, because he wouldn’t have to. In this view, men marry for sex, while women marry for economic security—a deeply depressing glimpse into the gender and marriage politics this movement seeks to impose on the rest of the nation. Have more children, but have them my way—A rift in the pronatalist-coal…
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…doctrinal statements from Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists and a good number of other traditions, but individuals may not feel those are binding, or they may feel their circumstances are exceptional,” he said. The Catholic Church hasn’t shifted its policies regarding end-of-life care, said Dierdre McQuade, and she explained that the difference between palliative sedation and physician-assisted death is intent. Even in the case of increasing m…
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