Search for "Headlines Videos cleantalkorg2.ru news usa Latest News Breaking News Breaking News World News national and world news World News The New York Times"

WaPo Film Critic Comes Out of the (Christian) Closet

By Gwynne Watkins

…ural signposts like TV shows and film trends. How do I know whether I’ve struck the right balance of “in the world, not of it?” And, like Hornaday, I’ve gotten some strange reactions to my faith from people in my field. I’m not an evangelist in the slightest, but several times, passages that were vaguely suggestive of my personal religious beliefs have been chopped by editors for being “too personal” or “tangential.” And maybe they were. But also…

Updated: Dr. Oz Thinks Anti-Muslim’s Sugar-Daddy Sheldon Adelson is “Not So Bad”

By Garibaldi

…Israel, none other than Rabbi Shmuley Boteach interviewed Dr. Oz for the Jerusalem Post. Asked why he chose to come to Israel Dr. Oz replied that it was “an effort to better understand the source of the universal Jewish values that have so positively impacted on the world and the place from which they stem.” Is it really necessary to visit Israel to better understand Jewish values? Can’t one just as easily become acquainted with Jewish values, rig…

Spiritual (And Jewish), But Not Religious

By Martin Kavka

…r support to Jewish arts and service organizations, and loosening (but not breaking) the link between Jewishness and the state of Israel. It may even entail hiring secular leaders to join the staffs of synagogues. The history of Jews in America is a story of decentralization, in which Jews refuse to heed authorities telling them how they must perform their Judaism and/or Jewishness. If Jewish leaders fight that story, the time when Jewish “nones”…

New Poll: ‘Faithful Catholics’ an Endangered Species

By Linda Woodhead

…mly into the existing sheepfold of moral teaching, the tension may reach a breaking point. Perhaps Francis is clever enough to have anticipated that, and perhaps he has subtle plans to turn such a crisis to good ends. Perhaps not. *** The research reported here was funded by two of the UK’s research councils, designed by Linda Woodhead and administered by YouGov. The surveys are available at http://faithdebates.org.uk/research/. Three separate sur…

Black Church Leadership Gathering Excludes Women

By Hazel Cherry

…ront when there would be no forefront without them. The Full Gospel denominational body believes that the faces and black bodies of women could not possibly fit the description of a general, chosen generation, or world leader and yet women walk and live in these capacities every day. Are they really saying that Jarena Lee, Bishop Vashti McKenzie, Dr. Jackie McCullough, Rev. Gina Stewart, Pastor Claudette Copeland and all the other countless women…

What Would Ai Weiwei Do? What the Smashing of a Million-Dollar Artwork Has to Teach Us

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…to pull from tradition, to find one’s place within it, and to turn that in new ways, often breaking things in the process. Teachers and writers on religion can have an understated aim of performing an iconoclastic move toward the students’ own assumptions, their own ideals and images. We call it “critical thinking,” and modern universities are founded on such an ideal. But, translated across the inside-outside divide, critical thinking becomes a s…

When Satire is Redundant

By Holly Welker

…ng” (because Mormons aren’t supposed to gamble, and obeying one rule while breaking another is morally iffy) or “Relief Society Counselor Asks Sisters to Cultivate ‘More Appealing Problems’” (based on a woman I knew who complained about how she disliked helping people with “unappealing” problems—like there are really any other kind) or “MTC Fashion Advisor Calls Scriptures ‘Great Accessory’” (because the fashion and makeup classes sister missionar…

Two and a Half Men Child Star Calls Show “Filth”

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…k people” in an insultingly reductive and fatuous way. Black people of the world! Angus Jones LIKES you! He wants a church where there is a FULL SET of you, because he wants the COMPLETE BLACK PEOPLE CHURCH EXPERIENCE! My GOODNESS! Are you not FLATTERED? No no no. No more of that, please. Mr. Jones, you are not a college student, your dorm room is not your church, and “black people” are not the flokati rug from TJ Maxx that will really tie the r…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…in generic forms and cost as little as $10 at big-box retailers. But many newer kinds aren’t and cost upwards of $40 month. Women need to use the form of oral contraceptive, or contraception in general, that best suits their personal and medical needs, not what happens to be on the blue-light special. More importantly, the bishops’ argument completely ignores the more expensive, and more effective, longer acting forms of birth control that insura…

Rick Warren’s Biblical Blowback

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ble to eliminate the indigenous peoples from the land. Some places, like Jerusalem itself, were not taken until much later, during the first unified campaigns under King David, who renamed the city after he took it, as “David’s City.” Why, then, were the children of Israel incapable of completing a God-ordained genocide? Not for moral reasons, oddly enough. No, the real reason is revealed in the next book, the book of Judges. The book of Judges te…