Religion Dispatches
…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…
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…am one of the religious leaders in this country who has one of the largest numbers of black gay churches in the U.S. gathered together. I don’t know anybody that has a larger number of black gay churches meeting together. Not gay churches—the MCC definitely has the corner on that. Do you work together? Very closely. In fact I have an MCC credential, an ordination. Were there times in your life when you did question your ability to stay in the chu…
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…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…
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…the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a church in Colorado Springs than the rapid population boom fueled by cheap land that would lead to a new free market Christianity political power base in the Western United States. In less than a decade, Haggard built one of the most influential megachurches in the nation. Not Everybody Loves a Comeback Story…
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…ion by joining other denominations or leaving Christianity altogether. The number of priests and nuns was at an all-time low even before the recent sexual scandals, and the number of self-identified Catholics world-wide keeps declining. Many of those who remain in the Church ignore standard doctrines and believe what they want. How many Catholics disobey Church rules? About as many as the angels dancing on a pinhead. Believers know that Jesus prom…
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…lves as charismatic or Pentecostal Christians (38%).” Pinning down precise numbers for LLDM is almost impossible. The church claims to have more than three million members abroad, and 1.5 million in Mexico, which would make it the country’s largest non-Catholic religious institution. The 2010 Mexican census reported only around 200,000 members, but that number may well be low (the Mormon church in Mexico has argued that the religious count was ina…
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…sformation” of the Catholic Church that is under way, “a decisive shift in numbers towards the Global South—to Asia, Africa and Latin America.” A century ago, he says, two-thirds of the world’s Catholics were in Europe, but by the middle of this century that number will fall “to perhaps a sixth.” Geography is not destiny, but it is only natural that prelates from one part of the world will tend to speak for the traditions with which they are most…
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…that unusual. First, there’s the fact that having written about this for a number of magazines that might be said to be sort of mainstream (Harper’s, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mother Jones) and talked about it on very mainstream television programs (NBC Nightly News, CNN, etc.) and radio (Marketplace, Fresh Air, BBC, etc.), I’ve sort of established ownership of the story. That may be a good thing for my book sales, but it’s bad for journali…
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…ed Heritage USA. Built on more than 2,300 acres on the border of North and South Carolina, the park was nearly twenty times larger than Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando. It featured campgrounds, an RV park, a water park, a television studio, an amphitheater, a 500-room hotel, shopping centers, and restaurants. In 1986, the park welcomed six million visitors, making it the most attended non-Disney theme park in America. The bonanza didn’t la…
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…,800 deaths occurring each year due to lack of Medicaid expansion in North Carolina. He cautions us to avoid the path of political expediency and to envision and struggle towards the reign of God here on earth. He questions why progressives gave up using the word “welfare” when it’s in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution and why even President Obama won’t use the word “poor” when it’s one of the most prominent words and themes in the Bible. I am…
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