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O(pinn)ion: Cosmic Lessons: When the Ministry Pulls a Madoff

By Anthony B. Pinn

…does little to resolve them. Rather, it paints them as somehow useful, and best addressed through the tools of spiritual insight—a spiritual insight in service of unchecked material acquisition. Did members of that church really need to lose hard-earned money in order for their God to provide them a vital lesson? Where’s the compassion in that? The situation is best addressed by recognizing the manner in which greed and a misguided sense of the re…

RD News Round-Up—Oct.14, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…ct the hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian people who are doing their best to raise the children they have adopted. As someone who adopted a child, Cindy and I know better than most couples the amazing satisfaction that comes from providing love to an unwanted child. I believe a child is best raised by a mother and father because of the unique contributions that they make together to the development of a child.” McCain refused to rule out nom…

Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

By Bruce Ledewitz

…lear and unambiguous first principles of the Constitution were and are the best guarantee of our right to figure it all out for ourselves, and our best defense against the rear guard action being waged by the religious right and its allies in our time. So, sure, let’s have public religious and non-religious expressions in all of their richness and variety. But let’s also confront and defeat anything that would erode, in fact or appearance, the rol…

The Battle for the Meaning of Religious Freedom Day

By Frederick Clarkson

…om may very well determine the future of democracy in our time, just as it did in the 18th century. As historian John Ragosta told RD last year: A republic could not work if government and church officials… were trying to control what we think or prescribe what was the ‘best’ religion or which people were the ‘best’ citizens based upon their religious beliefs. If people were to make informed political choices themselves, they had to be free to thi…

From Empire to Shire: Rod Dreher’s Nostalgia for Middle-Earth

By Gustavo Maya

…(undermining the claim that the Reformation shattered religious unity). As best I can tell something like the Nicene Creed—for which we can thank Emperor Constantine—expresses the theological commitments they have in common. Dreher clearly means something more by “theologically traditional” than the commitments of the Nicene Creed. He wants a metaphysical view of creation that grounds a universal and unchanging morality. If that’s the case, he’s g…

Breaking Up with God: I Didn’t Lose My Faith, I Left It

By Sarah Sentilles

…of the first design contests he held. He asked people to come up with the best design possible for a mobile AIDS clinic for a town in a country in Africa. He posted the deadline, and he waited. He didn’t think anyone would submit anything, but on the day of the contest’s deadline, a delivery man from Federal Express rang the doorbell to his tiny studio apartment in New York City. He was carrying a huge bag stuffed with envelopes. “Wow,” the found…

Irony Thick in Bush Interview with Focus on the Family

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ng the hypocrisy of his words. Daly, similarly, did what he and Focus does best—not getting that the message they’re putting out starkly reveals their own hypocrisy. For example, Bush tells Daly: “I don’t believe you can lead by demonizing somebody. I believe you lead by convincing somebody,” he says. “And in my case, I was unable to convince (some people) on different issues. I understood that.” Here’s where tears of frustration begin. While Daly…

Modern Media and the “Exhibition Value” of the Corpse

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ographs taken at Abu Graib… In short, the camera is not best suited to the presentation of Hamlet’s great soliloquies. “Such stuff as dreams are made of” do not have exhibition value, and neither do ghosts. But corpses do. So the images that stick best to the celluloid are Ophelia’s corpse floating on water, or Hamlet’s corpse, dominating the stage in death. And that is why they stick best to the Modern memory as well. Ironically, what is missing…

Democratic Egypt Tests a Divided Israel

By Shaul Magid

…g; even if it may not serve our interests in the short run, it’s still the best alternative human beings have come up with. In this case, one can certainly understand Netanyahu’s concern; Mubarak is “the devil he knows.” But it’s often the case that autocratic rulers are easier to deal with since they typically answer to no one. Yet, while they appear more stable in the short run, more dictatorships have been overthrown by democratic movements tha…

I Confess, I’m Ex-Straight

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…thingy … totally disgusted me. (That purity vow was a godsend!) I tried my best to be straight. I had the best of training. My parents were both straight. My brothers and sisters were all straight. It wasn’t until adulthood that I found out I had a lesbian cousin. As far as I knew, I came completely from straight stock. I simply had to be straight, right? Well, not so much. At the age of 16, I uttered those dreaded words, “I am a lesbian.” The fac…