Religion Dispatches
…ld want to share a room with a younger brother? Gross, I said to myself on Cassie’s behalf. Then, when Cassie is at school feeling pretty awesome with her little crew of friends, away from her father’s sweaty, wild-eyed freakout over stupid Colton’s daydreams, she’s mocked by boys for having a brother who has visions of heaven and hauls off and hits two of them in the face. Those of you who think those boys were mere stand-ins for her parents and…
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…motel in Modesto, California. Worried about Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry caricature of itinerant preachers, Graham asked his associates to consider the pitfalls that had discredited earlier revivalists and to propose ways to avoid those perils. After prayer and discussion, they decided on several principles: their salaries would be fixed by the organization, not a portion of the offerings; they would never criticize any religious leader; they wo…
Read More…at graphic photos and videos, distributed widely through electronic media, can call us instead to reconsider and reject oppressive social norms. The televised images of civil rights marchers attacked by dogs and fire hoses made the kind of gut-level impact that an op-ed could not have matched. Such images can call us away from vengeance. In these moments we see how, as Brueggemann explains, the “three summons of hospitality, generosity, and no ven…
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…cing ourselves from the shooter is a way of saying whom we stand with. The case for excommunication is even stronger with Alexis. Nonviolence is one of the core tenets of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has spent over fifty years fighting the Chinese government with nothing but the moral force of his convictions, and Buddhist monastics in both Tibet and Vietnam chose to burn themselves alive in protest rather than take up arms against their oppressors. I…
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…rosties in the Lake of Fire before pastor Greg Locke ever shuts down his local New Testament church because a demon-possessed buckwild tyrannical government told him to!” “Yes! Blow them shofars! This means war! This is our battle cry! Church! Stop being asleep!” He denounced as “Jezebel churches” those that had closed to the public because of Covid. He’s referring to the biblical figure of Jezebel, a Queen of ancient Israel whose story does not e…
Read More…18th century, a rhetorical convention that then became part of early American political discourse. There is also a more recent history of Lamborn’s introducing resolutions to recognize “Christianity’s importance to western civilization,” and to declare an early weekend in May as “Ten Commandments Weekend.” (Think Judge Roy Moore gone national.) The coincidence here of the most recent resolution and Trump’s much-noted meeting with a large group of…
Read More…agencies to turn away LGBTQ children and youth, allows doctors to deny medical care, and state officials to decline to marry couples of whose marriage they disapprove. This reasoning likewise influences the religious freedom rules propounded by the U.S. Department of Justice under Jeff Sessions, and such matters as whether commercial bakers of wedding cakes have to do business with same-sex couples. (The breadth and depth of such claims making it…
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…often covered up by patriarchal leaders. In all of my research on evangelical culture in Colorado Springs, including sitting through dozens of sermons, Bible study conversations, and conducting around one hundred interviews, I rarely heard anyone mention the existence or possibility of sexual abuse taking place within the church. The current focus on LGBT “grooming” portrays threats to children as stemming from an imagined other, outside of conse…
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…iven to the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma which was the hub of African-American businesses and cultural life. However, Black Wall Street was applicable to several Black business districts throughout the South, including places like Durham, North Carolina. Black neighborhoods were designated with names like “Black Wall Street, “Little Africa,” and “Little Hayti” (named for the island nation of Haiti). Whereas many Black business districts w…
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…compelled to address the issue. While the good intentions of many evangelicals dedicated to curtailing abuse are not in doubt, whether evangelicals are capable of addressing abuse in a scaled and sustained way that will help protect potential victims is doubtful. The limits of evangelical imagination, framing, and ideology certainly militate against abuse prevention. And these limits are neatly illustrated in a recent article in Christianity Toda…
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