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End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…m. You’re talking about a great revelation that opens the Bible in so many ways and opens people’s eyes to new ways of thinking and considering God. I see the lure of reading it literally because it makes everything a slogan and a bumper sticker. It’s like you pull shades from people’s eyes and they say, “Ah, I never thought of that.” I was recently in Milwaukee and I took the shadow of Moses and lifted it out of Matthew’s gospel, starting with th…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…ngelical ways of reasoning fell mute. It seemed to be not just a different way of understanding, but a different way of reasoning altogether. In fact, at the very time Holvast and Spiegel encountered it, the ‘new paradigm’ had just been invented. In the period of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a group of quintessentially American tinkerers grafted new practices of ‘spiritual mapping’ and ‘spiritual warfare’ onto a peculiar and radical the…

The Atheist Encounter with Christianity: A Failure to Disbelieve?

By Paul Wallace

…merely a naked emperor, that it is foolishness and self-deception all the way through. One may believe that Christianity is a simple fear-based superstition that will eventually be outgrown and tossed out, that it is about nothing but ignorance and make-believe. But maybe these beliefs about religion are just temporary and protective. Maybe they help one maintain one’s self-identity and get one through the day, but how well do these ideas correla…

“Paleo” is More Than a Fad Diet: Boyd Eaton’s Plan to Return to Eden

By Michael Schulson

…l, and I think they’re basically doing good for the world. I myself have always been more interested in it in an ideological or academic way. I want to find out more and more about how people lived and how that relates to how we live now. To me it’s an intellectual exercise. It does seem to fit into these other intellectual currents, going back to the story of the Garden of Eden. What do we lose when we leave a lifestyle behind? What do we lose wh…

A Color-Blind America? Don’t Fall For The Okey-Doke

By LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

…er forget that there have always been exceptional minorities who paved the way for this moment. Always be aware of the double-consciousness that minorities in this culture embody. Never think that in some distorted way, the election of a self-identified African American for the office of president of the United States should or can assuage white guilt about the negative treatment of blacks in this country. And never forget that this country’s hist…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…piritual field. If there is a way to encounter the sacred or the divine, a way to draw closer to nature, a way to engender compassion for humanity, they will give themselves over to it without rejection, judgment, or reservation. There will be less reliance on or need for religious experts: namely, full-time, seminary-trained, ordained or authorized clergy. “Membership” as currently defined by (and deemed essential for) the institutional church wi…

Alabama’s IVF Ruling Reveals Deep Ties to This Increasingly Influential Christian Right Movement

By Annika Brockschmidt

…’s a way to control women and anybody else who can become pregnant. It’s a way to police their bodies. It’s a way to relegate them to a second class status as the Christian nationalist ideology dictates. In other words, we’re talking about dragging this country back to a time when conservative White Christian men ruled. That’s the goal of Christian nationalism in America. That is what we are fighting against. But while the majority opinion itself…

Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

By Peter Montgomery

…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out after zuhr prayer one day. There it was: a whole section with all women in it. Not wanting to get my hopes up too high and then be disappointed (because this was at least 45 minutes after the prayer had ended), I ask the female guard, “al-Nisaa yajuz tusalli hinna?”—are women allowed to pray here? And she said, “yes, this is the wo…