Search for "cheap airline tickets from washington dc to sudan phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

Late last month, Pope Francis met with charismatic Christian and Pentecostal leaders at the Vatican, including prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a popular American religious figure whose theology and lifestyle is directly at odds with the Pope’s. The meeting was not the humble Pope’s first encounter with the self-anointed bishops of bling. In February, he recorded a video message for a Copeland conference, in which he called for u…

Religious Right to Newsweek: ‘Woe to [You] for Even Printing This’

By Bill Berkowitz

…ncil on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Earlier this month, the Washington, DC-based Brookings Institute entered the discussion with the release of a new report titled “Serving People in Need, Safeguarding Religious Freedom.” Co-authored by Washington Post columnist and Brookings senior fellow E.J. Dionne, and Melissa Rogers, director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University Divinity School (formerly execu…

The Washington Post’s Marriage Counselor

By Sarah Posner

Today the Washington Post published a piece by W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson originally headlined, “One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married.” The subheadline, even more unbelievably, read: “The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer hitched to their baby daddies.” The headline, after criticism and mockery on Twitter, was quickly changed to “One way to end violence against women? Married dads” a…

Denzel’s Profane Preaching: A Religious Movie for the Rest of Us

By Sean S. O'Neil

…ld. But Flight, like most of the other religiously-themed scripts to which Washington agrees to lend his star power, is no Kirk Cameron morality play. As in The Book of Eli, in which Washington played a post-apocalyptic loner who creates a trail of gore during a violent spiritual pursuit of the lone remaining copy of the Bible, the celluloid preaching in Flight is rated R. In addition to the early lingering shots of full-frontal and rear nudity, t…

Exodus From Rahm’s Washington

By Daniel Schultz

…s for Lieberman to contend with. The point is that just about everybody in Washington works for The Man. Like Digby says, it’s a company town, and when she says “The Company,” she’s not talking about the feds. It’s really much easier to understand what’s going on in D.C. these days when you surrender the fond dream that there are competing ideologies mounting a battle there. There’s really only one, whose interests are flacked to greater or lesser…

Santorum and the New Catholic-Evangelical Alliance

By Sarah Posner

…, and, finding it tepid, deciding not to jump in. For a deep dive into the Washington scene, Charles Pierce’s 2003 piece about Opus Dei in the Boston Globe magazine adds important context not only to Santorum’s flourishing into a rigid Catholic ideologue, but to the Beltway political culture in which such conservative politicians were groomed. The piece also helps explain, rather presciently, how a conservative Catholic like Santorum could be winn…

What We Don’t Know About Black Social Gospel: A Long-Neglected Tradition Is Reclaimed

By Gary Dorrien

…espouse protest politics and social gospel theology; supposedly, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois were not involved with the social gospel, so the social gospel does not illuminate Washington versus Du Bois; supposedly, religious intellectuals no longer mattered by the end of the nineteenth century, so it doesn’t matter if we ignore whatever black religious intellectuals might have existed; supposedly, the social gospel petered out in the…

RDPulpit: No Time for Lukewarm Economic Reform

By Peter Laarman

…that hurts everyone but that hurts the poor most of all. This Wall Street-Washington cabal is still ascendant, and it very much includes respected Democratic insiders like Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, the man who gives our new President his daily economic briefing. As the preface to “Sold Out” puts it: In most of the United States you can go to jail for stealing a loaf of bread. But if you have paid off Washington, you can steal the life sa…

It’s Not About Cake: Anti-Gay Vendors Want a Constitutional Right to Discriminate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ices without regard to a number of protected characteristics—including, in Washington and Colorado, an LGBT identity. (Washington updated its statewide non-discrimination law to include sexual orientation and gender identity in 2006, and Colorado followed suit in 2008.) Those laws, duly enacted by state legislatures, are what Masterpiece Cakeshop and Arlene’s Flowers are really looking to undercut in the name of “artistic expression” and “religiou…

Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ome LGBT Catholics were disappointed in the pope’s visit, according to the Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers: Marianne Duddy-Burke, president of Dignity USA, a group of LGBT Catholics, during an interview with the Washington Blade expressed disappointment that Francis did not speak out against anti-LGBT violence and the criminalization of homosexuality while addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Duddy-Burke also criticized the Argentin…