Religion Dispatches
…” I was flabbergasted at what I was hearing—a staunch Republican switching tickets. It wasn’t long before my shock increased when my mother later that same morning said of McCain, “I can’t vote for him. He acts like he’s supposed to just be elected without doing anything.” When I asked if she would vote for Obama, she hedged. “I don’t have to vote for anybody.” True, she doesn’t, but I hate to think she might not vote for Obama simply because he’s…
Read More…erendum petition were invalid, the petitioners no longer had the requisite number of signatures to place the referendum on the ballot. The subpoenas, served on pastors who are not litigants in the lawsuit, seek a broad range of documents and communications, including sermons, regarding their statements on homosexuality, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), and the petition process. Represented by the religious right legal firm Alliance Defen…
Read MoreWhile a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…
Read More
…ine is an event co-sponsor—no small potatoes considering the mainstream cachet of Jim Wallis, the founder /editor of Sojourners and author of the chart burner, God’s Politics. And McLaren has friends outside the faith box too. The Sierra Club is signed up. You tell me the last time people paid for tickets to a preacher-meets-politico-meets-tree-hugger event. Observing, then, the McLaren-brand machine gurgling and chirping right along, a fair quest…
Read More
…ents, booked an on-campus venue, and began to advertise the event and sell tickets. Then, 11 days before the drag fundraiser was set to take place, WT President Walter Wendler, who has a record of inserting his right-wing Christian bias into his public roles, unilaterally canceled the performance via a pedantic email. Seidel tells the story of the drag show cancelation at West Texas A&M (clip=5.5 minutes): Much of the moralizing communique was cou…
Read More…Back from my Bloggingheads hiatus, I talk with Get Religion’s Mollie Hemingway about whether Mitt Romney’s plan to discuss his Mormonism tonight at the Republican National Convention benefit his candidacy: And we also discussed the significance of the fact that Barack Obama is the only Protestant on both presidential tickets: …
Read More
…n 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 arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
Read More
…this, but as it stands, I have three different prayer time schedules: my iphone has one from the Ipray app; and I printed one off line from Islamicity; then collected one from my favorite mosque, when I went there for the tarawih prayer the night proceeding the first day of fasting. None of them have the same time on it. I therefore create a buffer to offset any slight disagreement a few minutes in the morning and a few at sunset. The rest I leav…
Read More
…u stand, they’re right, or not.” Maybe it is time to get the muftis on the phone after all. In the United States, at least, religious leaders and politicians have deferred some of society’s most pressing ethical concerns to the wisdom of the market. Calls that the “end of history” lies with neoliberal capitalism are being heard as far as the People’s Republic of China. Not without reason, the 20th century’s question of why free markets has been re…
Read More
…life forms far more advanced than us in the universe just given the sheer numbers. Given how close we are to developing artificial intelligence right now, it’s also easy to think that another species did that on a planet somewhere far away and changed the universe. Given the fact that we’ll have A.I. in two hundred years that will potentially be a million times smarter than us, it could expand through the universe very quickly. I wrote this artic…
Read More