Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…elevision host Pat Robertson and many other right-wing Christian activists today—are postmillenialists. Hence they believe that a Christian kingdom must be established on Earth before Christ’s return. They take seriously the idea of a Christian society and a form of religious politics that will make biblical code the law of the United States. These activists are quite serious about bringing Christian politics into power. Bray said that it is poss…
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…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…
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…e and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Hard questions for today Reading “Beyond Vietnam” today stirs up deep memories and raises difficult questions for me. I was just cutting my activist teeth in 1967, and I wondered then—as I do now—about my vocation and our vocation as seekers of justice and peace. Today, as then, the Left is divided between so-called “centrists” (ignoring how far to the right the center has moved) and those wh…
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…uld go on and on. I think that many of our intellectual problems about God today come from the loss of this reticence. We are all talking far too easily today about God and what we say is often facile. We often learn about God as children, at the same time as we learn about Santa Claus. But as we mature, our ideas about Santa Claus change and become more sophisticated, though our ideas about God can get stuck in an infantile mode and become thereb…
Read More…ing anti-Catholic and anti-Hispanic sentiments in America. But speakers at today’s press conference suggested the church has better options. “Surely Archbishop Oscar Romero is a more worthy candidate for the Hispanic peoples of the Americas,” said Norma Louise Flores, author of a MoveOn.org petition opposing the canonization. Steven Newcomb, co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decod…
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…tinue to romanticize the “conservative resurgence” and “biblical fidelity”—code for continuing to deprive women and LGBTQ folks of power—in his commentary on the new report for Christianity Today. After all, both major architects of the power grab and purge of moderate and liberal actors from SBC institutions that SBC partisans euphemistically call “the conservative resurgence”—Paul Presser and Paige Patterson—now stand credibly accused of sexual…
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…a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others. However, today, as in the past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality.” Indeed, if we are discussing the abstract concept of religious liberty — the kind guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — it’s hard to justify scare quotes. Even the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) came into being throu…
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…ued, regardless of why they support BDS, the fanatics and fools are simply promoting a new anti-Semitism. Once Jews were singled out and held to a different standard than other peoples. Today, the Jewish State is singled out and held to a difference standard than other countries. [Emphasis added.] This is an interesting claim. The unjustified singling out of Jews which has been emblematic of anti-Semitism historically is now transferred to an enti…
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…ual physical war, but a Cold War. How did Hoover connect with Christianity Today? Christianity Today is a new magazine in the fifties. It’s just starting out. And they’re trying to connect with prominent individuals that they believe will help to bolster this new thing they’re calling “neo-evangelicalism” or “modern evangelicalism.” And they reach out to Hoover and ask him to be one of their contributors to the magazine. And Hoover does that. Hoov…
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