Religion Dispatches
If you have been following the Sullivan vs. Dreher contretemps, a spinoff of Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek cover story, Forget the Church. Follow Jesus, you may have noticed that Rod Dreher’s surrebuttal makes strategic use of the most famous work of a much-revered figure, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dreher quotes The Cost of Discipleship to make the point that following Christ (discipleship) means you cannot pick and choose which parts of Christ’s teachin…
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…” and is “spirit-led” or derives from “divine revelation.” That makes it difficult to characterize, since he is mixing a lot of old doctrines and “heresy” together to make his NAR movement. Wagner’s founding of the NAR comes out of two streams: one, his time at Fuller seminary from the 1970s on, working with John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard church movement, and second, from his work in the church growth movement. He was considered to be the he…
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…l abuse to denominational authorities. Those fears are, unfortunately, well-founded. Of those victims who did report their victimization to Episcopal leaders, the number one assessment from both trans/non-binary and cisgender respondents was that “little or no change” came about as a result. 20.6% of transgender and non-binary survivors reported that they simply left the church altogether. By comparison, “only” 10.7% of cisgender women felt they h…
Read More…for an executive who, when I pointed out the desktop computer in his new office, responded “Oh, that will make a nice doorstop.” He’d never learned to type, much less use a PC. His father apparently had given him the advice that if he took a job with typing as one of the duties, he’d always be stuck in that sort of position. Never start in the mailroom, etc. I hated that guy. Anyway, this Bloomberg piece on power players eschewing the use of cell…
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…which only the living, liturgical and sacramental life of the Church can offer, it can certainly provide a unique supplement and support in both preparing for the encounter with Christ in community, and sustaining the new believer in the journey of faith which then begins. Indeed, Pope John Paul II was the first pope to use SMS (short message service, i.e. “texting”) technology to send out a “daily papal message” to believers. Pope John Paul also…
Read More…m” and “racism”: because they allege something so horrible that, like a traffic accident or Qaddafi video, you just have to look. No surprise, then, that a Jewish far-right organization named “Emergency Committee for Israel” has produced a cheap YouTube video showing a couple of crazy people at Occupy Wall Street shouting antisemitic slogans. For good measure, they’ve thrown in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Eliot Spitzer endorsing the sentiments…
Read More…n I felt unwelcome as an unmarried single mother. Catholic University had offered little support. Now a seminarian seeking ordination as a Reformed Christian minister, this was the first time I had returned in more than 30 years. Speaking only in Spanish, the pope’s homily touched upon the damage native people suffered through the system of missions that Junipero Serra help found. “The Church, the holy People of God, treads the dust-laden paths of…
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…ch’s ministers, range from an immoderate desire for total change without sufficient reflection or grounding, to an attitude that would solve everything by applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations. In the next section, the pope reminds us that not everything needs to be resolved by the Magisterium, and that interpretations of authority can vary. He also says this about diversity: Each country o…
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…had belonged to for over 20 years—only to discover that Stutman, too, is affiliated with J Street. “I said to her, please don’t do that, that’s the worst thing that can happen to the Jewish community,’” said Stutman, who serves the largely millennial congregation at the historic Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC’s Chinatown. She said she urged her friend to meet again and again with her rabbi “until you can figure out how you can have a con…
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…st week, having been dragged into the spotlight by a pair of extramarital affairs, and allegations of a hush money payment in the upper echelons of government. For a primer on the Family and the scandals involving Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John Ensign (R-NV), and Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC)—all of whom are connected by the Fellowship—watch the following clip from The Rachel Maddow Show. The story gained a new dimension after Maddow reported the sto…
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