Search for "CNN International cleantalkorg2.ru Headlines Videos Stories and Videos on News breaking newstoday bbc news news word BBC News World"

Why It’s Okay to Criticize Fundamentalist Evangelicals

By Tom Eggebeen

…just about anyone else who cares about the state of religion and prefers truth to hype. In other words, let Toto do his work—pull back the curtain, let the world see the smoke and mirrors and regain the trust of many. I am hopeful, however, about younger evangelicals who engage the world and learn about grace and compassion, American militarism, Christian arrogance; discovering that the EvaP “gospel of salvation” is seriously flawed and biblicall…

Democratic Candidates Don’t Need to Get More Religious, They Just Need to Get Known

By Daniel Schultz

…ly recognized as a faithful person isn’t a sure thing. If it were, Donald Trump would have been an also-ran to Ted Cruz and Ben Carson in 2016. Nor is this an argument that faith-based messages are themselves positive or negative. Rather, it’s a reminder that religion cannot be easily separated from the social, cultural, and political contexts in which it’s found. Biden won among conservative voters who are also churchgoers who are also (many) Bla…

Parent, Prophet, Con-Man, Spy: Who Was Rev. Moon?

By Kate Blanchard

…2, when the Reverend Moon matched them up as part of his mission to create world peace—a grassroots, bubble-up kind of world peace that began at home. This couple, still married after three decades, had overcome a language barrier and the awkwardness of living with a stranger, worked through the usual stresses of marriage, raised four children, and bought a small business. More remarkably, they were still believers that the Reverend Moon was finis…

Will God-Gaming Alter the Bible?

By Rachel Wagner

…he Book of Genesis by fulfilling quests of Abraham, which is based on the true stories of the Genesis [sic].” In order not to offend most Christians, the game will have to leave the biblical narrative intact and only allow interactivity in the narrative gaps in the biblical text, making the game potentially midrashic in performance. In other words, the game would have to find those places in the biblical story that allow for alternate or additiona…

Anti-Immigrant Fervor Is a Part of America’s Story

By Robert Bartholomew and Anja Reumschussel

…estaments to the human propensity to create, believe, and spread salacious stories driven by longstanding stereotypes, rumors, and fear. When we give into our xenophobic fears, we risk redefining a religion as a cult, and devoutness as fanaticism, while sacred traditions may be viewed as irrational superstitions. When any one group is under threat for their religious freedoms, it’s a threat to all of us. Moral panics are as much a part of the huma…

COVID-Denying Father Sergei is Just the Latest Example of the Russian Orthodox Church’s ‘Holy Man’ Problem

By Katherine Kelaidis

…n Arizona renegade But you don’t need to travel back to early 20th-century Russia to find an example of a destructive Orthodox monk superstar. Just outside the town of Florence, Arizona, 63 miles southeast of Phoenix, in the middle of the desert, stands St. Anthony’s Monastery. Though built to resemble the great monastic houses of the medieval Christian East, there’s something too clean, too luxurious about St. Anthony’s to pass muster. It’s the m…

A Queer New Year

By Peter Montgomery

…paigns. Equality Overseas Another story we’ll be covering in 2013 is the struggle for and against LGBT equality around the world. LGBT equality, including marriage equality, continued to make some advances internationally in 2012, and we’ll likely be seeing more progress this year in places like England, France, Uruguay, and Mexico, in spite of institutional religious opposition. In other places, like Russia, the church and state joined forces to…

Aurora, Batman, Crazy Congressmen

By Hussein Rashid

…the association of Judeo-Christian heritage with Batman seems forced. The stories of the Golden Age of Comics were written primarily by Jews, who brought their historical memories into their work and redrafted familiar stories. Superman was based, in part, on the story of Moses. Batman bears a strong resemblance to the Golem, a creature created by the Jewish community of Prague. I wonder which Judeo-Christian heritage Gohmert is referring to when…

The Internet is Not Killing Organized Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…cial network. From a somewhat less violent perspective, are not all of the stories of the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, et al at some level stories of questioning, challenging, dissenting, and adapting dominant, mainstream religious traditions? As for claims on community, it seems clear that internet participation has so far had only limited impact on exploration outside of one’s tribe. The 15 million people hanging out at the Jesus Daily Facebo…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…In 1978, America was still reeling from the loss of the Vietnam War and struggling to regain trust in its government; the culture was transforming from an atmosphere of free love and pacifism into one of Technicolor consumerism. So while the Manson Family murders and the events at Altamont might have been blows to the hippie ethos of the ’60s, it was Jonestown, the utopian dream gone terribly, terribly wrong, that was its death knell. One of the…