Religion Dispatches
…essage from local leaders read. As initial reactions continue to arrive, today is a thoughtful day for Mormon people. With the support of the U.S. Supreme Court, LGBT families and their allies now take a great step beyond the prejudices of history and the hurt of the Proposition 8 campaign. But for Mormon families and congregations, however, the damage from Proposition 8 remains, and will remain—largely unaddressed and unremediated. Who has full…
Read More…ve near Dallas, Texas, you can attend Generals International’s Reformation Day celebration and pray for a “fresh start” for America, just in time for the elections. Reformation Day features Cindy Jacobs and Dutch Sheets, self-proclaimed apostles associated with the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation. Jacobs warns that President Obama is bringing God’s wrath in the form of natural disasters. And earlier this year Sheets railed against wimpy Chri…
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…called for an all-out war against the “secular humanist” ideologies of the day. The clash of these titanic forces by the late 1970s, observes Marsden, led to the culture wars that remain with us to this day. Despite being driven by the hope of overcoming the impasse created by the culture wars, Marsden’s last chapter, “Toward a More Inclusive Pluralism,” fails to offer anything like a public philosophy for how to better facilitate secular and reli…
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…lapel-grabbing zealot, staple-gunning his Xeroxed screeds about the End of Days to every telephone pole in town. Who raptured these guys out of mass anonymity, into the beatitude of celebrity? Wasn’t it us, the true believers who knew every line of every song by heart, singing along as Ziggy implored, on the razor’s edge between yearning and taunting, Gimme your hands ‘cause you’re wonderful Gimme your hands ‘cause you’re wonderful In his marvelou…
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…me to Defend our Children Outside of the Womb’: Pray Vote Stand Connects Anti-Abortion and Anti-Trans Messages ‘This is a War Meeting…This is Gonna Get Dirty,’ Anti-Woke Capitalism, & American ‘History’: Day 2 Roundup Barna Plays God, School Board Boot Camp, and the Birth of the ‘SAGECON’: Day 3 DeSantis is a No-Show, the Right’s ‘Secret Sauce,’ and Final Thoughts on Pray Vote Stand…
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…hedules. They’ve demanded a halt to such actions by November 23, “Black Friday,” the biggest shopping day of the year. If the company doesn’t move to meet their demands by then, the workers and their allies say there will be more strikes, sit-ins, rallies, and other actions across the country. Wal-Mart’s reputation as a Christian company has been one of the reasons the retail giant has been notoriously hard to organize. The company embedded itsel…
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…’s teachings on corporal punishment are virtually unchanged since Tomczak’ days as pastor. They continue to promote evangelical parenting manuals like Ted Tripp’s controversial Shepherding a Child’s Heart, which has sparked controversy over its endorsement of spankings for babies as young as eight months old. Application of this teaching can lead to kids being spanked multiple times a day (far more often than I was, as the daughter of very strict…
Read More…t a faculty member (read Scoutmaster) cannot. “One day you’re in; the next day, you’re out,” to use Heidi Klum’s ominous phrase on Project Runway. The controversy receiving the most attention this fall occurred at Azusa Pacific University in California, a Christian university with an undergraduate enrollment of 5500. In September, a faculty member who had been in the theology department for 15 years came out as transgender, to be known as H. Adam…
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…justice causes from women’s rights and the abolition of slavery to present-day struggles for marriage equality and ecological stewardship. Additionally, progressive people need a renewed commitment to building and sustaining communities of faith—houses of hope—that can nourish our values and empower us for the long-haul change needed to establish a just and sustainable society. Is there anything you had to leave out? We love the 19th-century progr…
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…franca among the religious right, forming the basis for Janet Porter’s May Day rally on the mall last year as well as the National Day of Prayer and Jim Garlow’s Pray and Act campaign. The Family Research Council and prominent religious right figures like Harry Jackson and David Barton all use the language. In other words, this is not a movement dreamed up by people with no understanding of Christianity who simply want to stir up fear of conservat…
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