Religion Dispatches
…side of Temple Square, cheerfully singing hymns from the screens of their iPhones or from green-backed hymnals, while a clutch of protestors—evangelical Christians, mostly, the same familiar, ragged gang materializing every conference—takes its place behind barricades on a small patch of grass. A stranger, upon learning that I don’t have one of the highly-coveted tickets to the Sunday Conference sessions, spontaneously offers me his last extra. Mi…
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…ark, and exactly one day before the election.] Back in May 2008, I made my reservations for the AAR and decided I would stay over for election day. It was the best decision of my life. From the Chicago Hilton Bar and the streets of Chicago, I saw history being made. I shouted and cried not only for the burden that is beginning to lift from our country, but from the burden of teaching the history of African-American religion with a heavy heart seme…
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…e could simply call out the numbers to cue support from those on our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arg…
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…” according to Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll. The church has 12 million members worldwide, 7 million of those in the United States. More than 100 clergy came out on the eve of General Conference. On Wednesday, delegates voted 428-405 to create a commission that “will spend at least two years reviewing policy on the subject” and developing a plan to deal with sharp differences within the denomination on inclusion of LGBT people in th…
Read More…d that as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s…
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…as no national controversy. Parents weren’t inundating administrators with phone calls threatening to pull their kids from school in order to protect them from Bush’s efforts at political indoctrination. But this time that’s exactly what happened. And in response to the controversy and the barrage of outraged parental phone calls, many school systems decided it was safest not to air the speech at all. Others required that alternative activities be…
Read More…a political liability for Huntsman (who Obama feared enough to dispatch to China) as it has been for the mild-mannered, sometimes wooden, and often mishandled Romney. His Mormonism may, in fact, be the most interesting thing about Mitt Romney. However the Republican primaries turn out, the prospect of a Huntsman run may remind the world that Mormonism is as capable of producing urbane, globally-minded moderates as it is of producing Cleon-Skouseni…
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…st version of the faith? Will the Dalai Lama choose not to reincarnate? In China itself there is the possibility (as mentioned earlier) of China becoming the largest Christian nation on Earth. Finally, what are the totally unforeseen movements, religions, events, and scriptures that will emerge in the next hundred years? What syncretism will our historian note? What religions totally impossible for us to imagine will she write about? What will qui…
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…those immigrants are non-white and/or non-Christian. But Kirk’s repeated “China Virus” tweets, and Trump’s powerful retweet, both connecting the spread of disease with the need to keep immigrants out, are a clear reminder that white Christian nationalism has always connected non-white immigrants with social and biological contamination. Immigration is framed as an issue of purity or contamination; a righteous body politic or pathological disease….
Read More…that the UNFPA has been “intimately involved” in the promoting abortion in China under that country’s one-child policy, which it claims has killed a number of people “comparable to the horrendous genocides by Hitler and Pol Pot.” (The eugenics falsehood is also disseminated about Planned Parenthood, and in this country, conservatives of late have been promoting the film Maafa 21, which claims that Planned Parenthood has been engaged in a plot to e…
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