Religion Dispatches
…net is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers—indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive.” Silence from the cacophony of networ…
Read More…campaigns designed to influence the outcome of the November elections. On today’s call, John Hagee insisted that St. Paul had instructed Christians to stand on the evil day, and that “the evil day is here.” He cited Bonhoffer looking the evil of Naziism in the face in Hitler’s Germany. Americans, he said are being “trampled” by the “secular left” because churches and pastors have “stopped defending the truth fearlessly.” Hagee said “We as a peopl…
Read More
…o women’s voices in the church: Women have a lot of things to say to us in today’s society. Sometimes we’re too chauvinistic, and we don’t allow room for women. Women are capable of seeing things from a different angle than men. Yeah, like from the angle of people who have the babies. Women do have a lot of things to say in today’s society–like they want to use birth control to plan their families responsibly. To bad Pope Francis can’t hear them….
Read More…” Homosexuality is considered a crime in Morocco. Article 489 of the penal code states that any one found guilty of carrying out “a deviant act with a person of the same sex” will be jailed for to up to three years. Last week three men accused of homosexuality were jailed to three years each. In March, Human Rights Watch called on Morocco to decriminalise homosexuality, saying that “criminalising consensual, adult homosexual conduct violates inter…
Read More
…some evangelicals)—finds wanting? I don’t think this is a common scenario today, but in the not-so-distant past (when petrodollars were for many the only source of funding for the new community’s infrastructure and institutions, and before the widespread disillusionment in the 1990s with the Wahhabi or quasi-Wahhabi indoctrination that could accompany this largesse) equally debatable and ahistoric doctrinal commitments were foisted within Muslim…
Read More
…ng to burn and send you to hell, where you all belong.” Ireland: New group promotes LGBT inclusion in Presbyterian Church The Belfast Telegraph reports on a retired lawyer’s efforts to create a group that would promote inclusion of LGBT people in the Presbyterian Church, an effort “to emulate the success of existing grups such as Changing Ireland and Accepting Sexuality, which have been operating within the Church of Ireland and the Irish Methodis…
Read More
…ive organizing that has led to major shifts in this country. Last week USA Today took a look at changes in Uruguay and across the Americas. From a story by Alan Gomez: Just a couple of years ago, this tiny country that’s squeezed between Brazil and Argentina found itself in the same position as so many of its Latin-American neighbors. Abortion was illegal. Gay marriage was illegal. Marijuana was not tolerated. In two quick years, all that has chan…
Read More…as the result of God’s fit punishment of Adam and Eve for “original sin.” (Today, 57 percent of white evangelicals reject evolution, believing that humans have always existed in their present form, while another 25 percent believe evolution was guided by God.) The historical-critical method of Bible scholarship meanwhile threatened the idea of scripture as the inerrant, uniform word of God. There were multiple authors and editors of scripture, sch…
Read More
…ked to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed V…
Read More
…as the result of God’s fit punishment of Adam and Eve for “original sin.” (Today, 57 percent of white evangelicals reject evolution, believing that humans have always existed in their present form, while another 25 percent believe evolution was guided by God.) The historical-critical method of Bible scholarship meanwhile threatened the idea of scripture as the inerrant, uniform word of God. There were multiple authors and editors of scripture, sch…
Read More