Search for "bbc news cleantalkorg2.ru bbc news news word news usa Breaking News Live Updates Politics World News The New York Times"

Southern Baptists Embrace Minorities, but Not Gays

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…est position yet held by an African-American” in the denomination, the New York Times notes. Fred Luter Jr. pastors a largely black church in New Orleans and is apparently an “overwhelming favorite to be elected president at the assembly next year.” This is great news for the Southern Baptists, who have been predominantly, if not exclusively, white since the denomination’s founding. One might ask why it took the denomination 11 years after the apo…

Obama’s Religion Ambassador: Inexperienced?

By Anthea Butler

…Web site, online presence, or apparent physical location), Chaplain to the New York Police Department, and a member of the Domestic Policy Council in the Clinton Administration. Impressive, perhaps, for the Christian speakers’ circuit, but not for diplomacy. So why would President Obama choose Cook? Dr. Sujay’s resumé, with no discernible international policy experience, her close ties to the Clinton administration, and several ill-defined busines…

David Barton: Falling from Grace?

By Paul Harvey

…balanced” approach on discussing the “controversial” historian Barton. The New York Times followed the usual tack in its story from May, noting that “many historians call his research flawed, but Mr. Barton’s influence appears to be greater than ever,” and adding that “liberal organizations” were raising the alarm “over what they say are Barton’s dangerous distortions.” In short, Barton’s history came down to some version of the usual liberal-cons…

Liberty University’s #NeverTrump Petition Is No Shot Heard ‘Round the World

By Anita Little

…ch to bear, and a group of Liberty University students released a strongly worded statement distancing themselves from Falwell and Trump: We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history. Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him… Because our president has led the world to believe…

Plant Porn and Physics Prayers

By Meera Subramanian

…Earth who are anonymous (even to themselves) and link humanity to God. His new book is Virtual Words, just out from Oxford University Press, evolved from his Jargon Watch column in Wired. Though he’s received some blessing from the scientific world—a geneticist at UC Berkeley, a zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and other notables were on the board of Keats’ International Association for Divine Taxonomy—his work more often gets called absu…

Is Sam Harris Really a White Supremacist?

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…s a white intellectual targeting a vulnerable minority. A largely positive New York Times review of The End of Faith could include, just in a few sentences near the end, that the reviewer felt some discomfort with Harris’ obsessive focus on Islam. Revisiting The End of Faith twelve years later, though, it’s striking to see how incessant, and how flimsy, Harris’ charges against Islam really are. In the opening pages, Harris invites his readers to i…

Compassion for AZ Shooter?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…feel the pain, the madness, that drove him to this desperate act? Can we truly suffer with him? The act of truly feeling compassion is hard work – and it’s work that we usually don’t see the point in doing. Why do I need to feel John Boehner’s pain? Why does an anti-gay person need to feel my pain? Why should we try to feel the pain of those without health insurance or without jobs? What good does that do? Doesn’t it just lead us further into des…

Teilhard’s Legacy Can’t Be Reduced to Racism: A Response to John Slattery

By Joshua Canoza

…s vision of ‘fire’ at the Royal Wedding comes largely from The Mass on the World, completed in 1923.” Fire imagery is central to Teilhard’s writing and Bishop Curry’s selection bears some affinity with “The Mass on the World,” but the sermon’s most direct citation is from an essay titled “The Evolution of Chastity” written in 1934. I find this omission strange, but it could stem from Slattery’s desire to separate Teilhard’s work into an acceptable…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…s out there besides the scientific method that can tell us a lot about the world we live in. There is the historical method, the philosophical method, the theological method, the linguistic method. All of these methods give us a way of looking at the world. So, just because the science of supernatural experience is inconclusive doesn’t mean that these things don’t exist. There is a great line by Huston Smith that sums it up very nicely: “absence o…

The Problem of Evil in Free Market Theology

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…iced by James Buchan in his extraordinary 1997 book, Frozen Desire: In the new world, first, there is no such thing as Providence, merely probability, which can be studied at the gaming table. Second, there is such a thing as usury: whatever Aristotle and the Gospels say, money is productive of more money, it does breed, and on Sunday, too… Third, the Church is quite wrong and human beings are all more or less alike. Reality is thus reconfigured o…