Religion Dispatches
…ehind series, discussed it on the Rachel Maddow show. Jenkins subsequently complained about how Maddow edited them, so she posted the entire interview (which you can watch at the bottom of this story). The exchange is worth watching in its entirety, but I will offer a brief summary analysis of the duo’s two-step. Jenkins and LaHaye wisely distanced themselves from a bald assertion that Obama is the Antichrist, retreating instead to a somewhat more…
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…spread the gospel….You don’t even have to go out of your way; people will come to your doorstep, anyway.” The whole thing has “Ned Flanders” written all over it. Maybe that’s why it seems to be having trouble catching on, even among Christians with a hexed—I mean, vexed—relationship to Halloween. The movement began in 2002, and the organization’s website, www.jesusween.com, doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2012. But it’s still worth talk…
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…and editors of scripture, scholars began to demonstrate, sometimes with incompatible stories and contradictory theologies. The New Testament’s gospels, this scholarship showed, were not composed shortly after Jesus’ death by his eyewitness disciples like Matthew and John. Rather, they were written accounts based on oral traditions and other now-lost writings, composed decades after Jesus’s death—with all the attendant problems of memory and recor…
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…biblical passages (chief among them John 10:10, in which Jesus says, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly”) to insist that God desires our physical and financial prosperity. Our task, in a phrase popularized by the movement (and its detractors), is to “name it and claim it.” The most virtuous and effective act in prosperity theology is positive confession, in which one claims and expresses gratitude to…
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…illed by the Ottomans. The official wonders if the ambassador’s sympathies come from his being Jewish. The ambassador responds that he is Jewish, and he is American, and America is a nation of refugees. At that moment, you have to take a breath. The United States is a nation of refugees, not immigrants. If we wish to hold on to a founding myth, that the people who came to Plymouth Rock were seeking religious freedom, then we have to say they were…
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…age. Anything to ensure we remain “good” in the eyes of a watching world. “Come as you are” and “Everyone is welcome!” are great examples that sound nice and allow us to avoid being accused of what we’re “against,” but again, they’re often simply untrue. In reality, these empty platitudes usually mean: “You can totally come to Sunday Services and give us money. But if you identify as LGBTQ, forget about working here or being affirmed. Oh, and if y…
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…t in a certain direction, but it is the reality of working respectfully in community. Go to top https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YaZs6HRInY Go to top So I’m not in favor of demanding Christians take particular social stances as a mode of pastoral ministry. To be very clear, it’s the “demanding” part that’s problematic here, not the idea that the Christian faith entails certain views on social equality. It does. And America very much needs leaders…
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…ut it goes to show that many anti-abortion activists want people who can become pregnant to live with this newly-located Overton window no matter what comes next. Keeping abortion illegal will always be more important to them than alleviating the suffering that an abortion ban would cause. There’s no turning back. But the questions shouldn’t stop there. What if the maternal mortality rate goes up? What if the police treat miscarriages as potential…
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…d strong Christian nationalist ties: 98 percent of the 147 were Christian, compared to 88 percent of Congress. Christian and Christian nationalist are not the same thing, but FFRF’s analysis makes a convincing case that most of the 147 fall into the latter category, including Greene. Greene’s Christian Nationalism is obvious in that oath video to the very end. One of her fellows says, “The bottom line is that sharia law is not compatible with Amer…
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…ucation were at the forefront of my mind while trying to understand the outcome of this historic 2016 election, in which over 81 percent of white evangelicals and born-again Christians voted for the president-elect. I lament that the very real lives and experiences of black and brown peoples, Muslims, immigrants, and so many others were apparently not on the radar of Christians, whose highest commandment is to love God and then love your neighbor…
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