Religion Dispatches
…him to fight. Early in the evening, as election results were trickling in, Jordan Sekulow, the son of Jay Sekulow, head of the Robertson-founded American Center for Law and Justice, and himself a Regent graduate, tweeted, “A warning for liberals tonight – don’t mess with Regent Law.” McDonnell sure didn’t campaign on his Regent cred; he left that to his opponent, Creigh Deeds, who probably spent too much time pounding McDonnell’s controversial gra…
Read More
…of Jesus. Mark’s gospel, we may recall, begins with his baptism by John in Jordan. There is not a word about how he came to this point, nor to his sense of mission. There are no stories from his childhood; he simply erupts onto the scene at the ripe spiritual age of 30 or so, then dies one month later. Matthew fills out the narrative a bit with a long family genealogy and the harrowing story of Herod’s attempt to murder this newborn messiah-to-be….
Read More
…governing state with no control of its borders, at the whims of Israel and Jordan? So with two-states down we appear only to have one-state, but Friedman says no, not that either. He says a ‘one state’ solution would be impossible, because it would mean death by a million votes. Only if Friedman means, by a one-state solution, a unitary state that makes no distinctions between its citizens. One option is a one-state, but one which would respect th…
Read More
This October marks the fortieth anniversary of the first worship service for the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches or MCC. The story of the service has been told often enough to count as mythic. It is a great story, especially when the denomination’s founder, Troy Perry, preaches it in the operatic style of his Pentecostal boyhood. He has also written it over the years, not least in his autobiography, The Lord is My Shepherd…
Read More…of a cross. This artifact was dubbed the ‘Ground Zero Cross’ by Fr. Brian Jordan, OFM, who celebrated mass at the foot of this cross during the recovery effort, later spearheading an effort to preserve it. David Silverman, President of American Atheists reflects on why they chose to resolve this issue using legal means. The cross was installed without regard to minority religious opinions. Our requests to include our own memorial, or to dedicat…
Read More
…“push Israel’s eastern border to its natural location on the banks of the Jordan River.” The occupying army cleared the way for civilian settlers who still use the mythic version of the 1967 events to claim an “inalienable right” to all that land. “Israel legitimately seized the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria in self-defense,” they argue, ignoring the historical evidence. “Israel’s moral claim to these territories, and the right of Isr…
Read More
…dern period have written about religion and sexuality in recent years—Mark Jordan, Sue Morgan, Jacqueline DeVries and others. They have recognised that religion is a vital context for understanding morals and the history of sexuality. Using the material in the book was a good way of extending this treatment of these two themes backwards in time. I am also a great admirer of the British writer Marina Warner, who has written some great books about h…
Read More
…led “sodomy,” in addition to violent new punishments for its conduct (Mark Jordan has told this story brilliantly, in a book called The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology). What is strange about this interpretation is that it is not how the Hebrew prophets or Jesus knew the story. They thought it a pretty simple story about violations of hospitality as symbolized through rape. The people of Sodom were known to be excessively wealthy, excess…
Read More
…olutionary it would be for the LGBT community, which has already led massive social reforms around marriage, to become the new reformers of Christianity—turning it from a religion of shame and guilt into the living embodiment of God’s beauty and unconditional love. As Mark D. Jordan has powerfully offered, in these pages: “There is no gay church, there is only church—which is never reformed, only reforming.” Much respect to Vines and his supporter…
Read More
…to advance American strategic objectives: gathering cultural intelligence, promoting religious tolerance, and patching up relations with local citizens whose lives have been damaged or destroyed by American military actions. In Afghanistan, the US required Navy Chaplains to give Koran lessons to citizens in an effort to cultivate particular understandings of Islam. A program called Voices of Religious Tolerance had US Marines taking Afghan elders…
Read More