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“Papers Please”: The Legal Battle Over Church Sex-Abuse Files

By Omar Shamout

…erarchical since each Catholic diocese operates independently. “There’s no central repository, even in the Vatican… where you can go and find a list of all the Catholic Church abuse files from around the world,” Clark said. “With the Mormon Church, everything that happens goes to Salt Lake.” The problem is those documents aren’t discoverable in court. The LDS Church maintains it does not keep records of child abuse. Plaintiff attorneys have been u…

Four Changes Evangelicals Must Make

By Richard Pierard

…hieve this noble goal. Also, there’s no need to jump aboard the “religious freedom” bandwagon when Southern Baptists could contribute funds to aid in the task of fostering religious freedom around the world through the respected and well-managed Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty. 2) A change must take place in the Billy Graham organization. Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has done much to sully the rep…

American Buddhism: Beyond the Search for Inner Peace

By Joshua Eaton

…sing. The movement was scheduled to begin in October with an occupation of Freedom Plaza in central Washington. The organizers included Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician who has led the campaign for single-payer health care, and Kevin Zeese, a social activist. I had signed on to this and went to D.C. for the launch events in early October, along with another American Buddhist monk, Ajahn Gunavuddho, and his mother, Ayya Santussika, a Buddhist nun….

God Invoked by Both Sides in Rhode Island Marriage Campaign

By Peter Montgomery

…es, “Marriage has been established and defined by God as a spiritual union between a man and a woman, and it is not to be altered by mankind or its government.” Marriage equality advocates aren’t ceding God to NOM and its allies. Religious leaders associated with the Rhode Island Religious Coalition for Marriage Equality are also taking a visible role in the marriage equality campaign. On Tuesday, Gov. Chafee stood with members of Rhode Islanders…

None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)

By Elizabeth Drescher

…(68%). This would perhaps invite deeper consideration of the relationship between belief and affiliation in the U.S. and across the globe. Or, maybe, reflection on how patterns of existential belief are changing within and beyond institutional religions. Yet Winston’s go-to source for context on the Pew studies is a University of Tampa sociologist, Ryan Cragun, whose quite respectable academic oeuvre focuses primarily on atheists and the otherwis…

A Dismayed Democrat Reads the Bible

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…aid ‘Yes!’ to Jesus and ‘No!’ to the powers that killed him. Those are the central truths of Easter, as I see it. To turn the question of Easter into a conflict about whether the tomb was really empty is an enormous distraction. Getting back to what you said earlier about the community creating the Bible—what would it mean if people came to think this way about this sacred text? It would be very difficult to believe in biblical inerrancy or infall…

Sin is Not a Crime: A Conversation with Patrick Cheng

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…g laws and rehabilitation. Atonement, where Jesus comes in to fill the gap between us and God, is this notion that Jesus has to pay a price, a “penal substitution,” on our behalf because we can’t pay the price that’s so huge for offending God. This is the legalistic model —it’s very medieval, where you have a Lord and you don’t want to upset the Lord. What you’re proposing to replace this is something that actually reaches further back in Christia…

Episcopal Church Removes Bishop Who Split Following LGBT Inclusion Vote

By Elizabeth Drescher

…fifth to succeed from the Church, following the Dioceses of San Joaquin in central California; Fort Worth, Texas; Quincy, Illinois; and Pittsburgh, PA. A pastoral letter from Jefferts Schori to members of the Diocese, however, made clear that The Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, as with other dioceses voting to secede, “continues to be a constituent part of The Episcopal Church, even if a number of its leaders have departed.” Steps have been…

Debating the “Nones” Part 3

By Katherine Stewart

…t because the nones are defined by their lack of association—they have no “central meeting house”—they cannot be taken seriously as a group. This assumes that in order for a group to be politically relevant, they must all get together on Sundays or believe in the same set of theological doctrines. But that is a standard that is not applied to any other politically relevant demographic. Do white evangelicals all believe the same thing? Not in the l…

‘Nones’ ≠ Nonreligious

By Elizabeth Drescher

…eir widely distributed, growing presence in the culture. They don’t have a central meeting house, a website, a leadership function. The bad news about this—beyond the practical difficulties of understanding this growing population in any real depth—is that Nones are fast becoming a vast tableau for the projected desires and anxieties of those of varying affiliations. For Christians, they are prodigals lost who, with the right music or marketing or…