…place just a day after legislators recognized LGBT Rights Day. From the Jerusalem Post: Bills proposed by Zionist Union and Meretz MKs allowing gay civil unions and same-sex couples to adopt, educating health professionals about gender identity and sexual orientation, prohibiting “conversion therapy” aimed at changing someone’s sexual orientation, and giving samesex partners of an IDF soldier killed in action the benefits heterosexual widows or w…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…dentity, a manhood purged of anything feminine. Consider the young purity crusaders I write about in chapter 13, “The Romance of American Fundamentalism.” They’re smart, hip, engaging kids; they scoff at the old Christian Right war chiefs, they live in Brooklyn and worship in Manhattan, they don’t like Bush—and they’re dedicated to an ideology that in its emphasis on “purity” above all is potentially farther right than anything Bush has ever dream…
…mes hesitatingly, as “unconfirmed”) by NPR, ABC News, The Huffington Post, New York Daily News, the Houston Chronicle, and many other local news outlets and blogs. The real Joel Osteen Ministries began to receive inquiries. The earliest official denial came from the real Joel Osteen’s Twitter account on April 8 in response to a tweet: “It is a false rumor. Pastor Joel is not leaving the church. -JOM Team,” it read. The media coverage then shifted…
…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 founder said. “Are all those mine?” “No,” the delivery person said. He pointed to three giant Fed Ex trucks lined up on the street behind him, their hazard lights blinking. “All those are yours.” I really love that story. I think it reveals how human beings are waiting to make the world a better pl…
…Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group to The Washington Times and The New York Post. The church’s materials include an excerpt from a book by Bruce Reyes-Chow, a teaching elder and former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA): “For many of us, being uncomfortable about public protests or what we perceive as aggressive expressions of frustration simply identifies our privilege and our ability to shield ourselves from the struggles that ot…
…them. Here’s one example of how that refusal to acknowledge plays out. The New York Jewish Weekhas just published an op-ed by Oded Na’aman, an Israeli army veteran who now works with the Israeli human rights group Breaking The Silence, which, using the testimonies of former IDF soldiers, educates the public about abuses committed by the Israeli military in the occupied territories. (I wrote about Breaking The Silence, and the generational shift am…
…mean any number of things, of course: from the simple and unsurprising non-news that sometimes people with the same job disagree with each other; to the possibility that personhood legislation is an unsettled question for US Catholic bishops; to the question of whether the bishops’ national fight with the Obama administration over contraception coverage has hardened their other positions on incipient human life. It would be premature to draw concl…
…s trying to live by its tenets have, therefore, been closed to the outside world. Two things have occurred which have caused Centennial Park to open its doors to interaction with the outside world and allow exposure in the media: first, the appeal from community service organizations such as Child Protective Services for the people of the polygamous communities to be more transparent, so that they can understand how to make their services availabl…
…No matter what direction the conversation about the film takes, the flashy news headlines always seem to steer it back to religious conservative anger at the “anti-biblical, pagan film,” to quote that ever-bubbling fount of conservative Christian outrage, Ken Ham. To be fair, one can find numerous thoughtfully written blog entries and op-ed pieces that explore Noah’s important moral and religious dimensions; and news agencies do report the odd sto…
…European and American weapons and money, we might remember that Christian crusaders saw Muslims as pagans and Jews as Christ-killers. We were both victims of their swords. We must remember that Catholic Spain expelled Muslims and Jews from our Spanish lands and took all our wealth in the same year, 1492. Social networking permits Jew and Muslim, Christian and Hindu, Buddhist and Atheist—of all nationalities—to create bridges that extend over the o…
