Religion Dispatches
…d dead had an eloquence all its own. Altogether a fitting beginning. The Latin root of “inauguration” harks back to Roman times and means “to consecrate by augury.” I’d say that today’s event augurs well for a new birth of decency. What we need is revolution, of course. But today I will settle for decency….
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…h wedding.” Greenberg and Jick may have been willing to pay that price. In today’s world, much of Jewish Studies takes place in secular university campuses across the country, and professors of Jewish Studies are evaluated for promotion or merit on the same grounds as their colleagues. Such parochialism can put those scholars at a disadvantage. In addition, it locks Jewish Studies into an identitarian model where courses would be taught by Jews, a…
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…uld go on and on. I think that many of our intellectual problems about God today come from the loss of this reticence. We are all talking far too easily today about God and what we say is often facile. We often learn about God as children, at the same time as we learn about Santa Claus. But as we mature, our ideas about Santa Claus change and become more sophisticated, though our ideas about God can get stuck in an infantile mode and become thereb…
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…e and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Hard questions for today Reading “Beyond Vietnam” today stirs up deep memories and raises difficult questions for me. I was just cutting my activist teeth in 1967, and I wondered then—as I do now—about my vocation and our vocation as seekers of justice and peace. Today, as then, the Left is divided between so-called “centrists” (ignoring how far to the right the center has moved) and those wh…
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…within groups, there is space for disagreement. That’s where Christianity Today resides, in that liminal space. People like Galli, whose occupation is serving an array of evangelical perspectives (not just white ones), know how to navigate that space. Knowing how to navigate it makes Galli a “liberal” in that he can recognize the legitimacy of various religious views without losing his sense of self. Being “liberal” in this way requires deference…
Read More…campaigns designed to influence the outcome of the November elections. On today’s call, John Hagee insisted that St. Paul had instructed Christians to stand on the evil day, and that “the evil day is here.” He cited Bonhoffer looking the evil of Naziism in the face in Hitler’s Germany. Americans, he said are being “trampled” by the “secular left” because churches and pastors have “stopped defending the truth fearlessly.” Hagee said “We as a peopl…
Read More…as the result of God’s fit punishment of Adam and Eve for “original sin.” (Today, 57 percent of white evangelicals reject evolution, believing that humans have always existed in their present form, while another 25 percent believe evolution was guided by God.) The historical-critical method of Bible scholarship meanwhile threatened the idea of scripture as the inerrant, uniform word of God. There were multiple authors and editors of scripture, sch…
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…the homosexuals,” Lively says. “There is nothing that they will not do to promote their agenda. There is no opposition that they will accept at any level. They must conquer every opponent and the spirit that has produced this book, this false Bible, this gay theology is the heresy of the modern world.” Canada: Prime Minister plans apology and pardons for people convicted under sodomy laws Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is reportedly planning to ap…
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…net is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers—indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive.” Silence from the cacophony of networ…
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…ked to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed V…
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