Religion Dispatches
…o-way street. Christians are going to celebrate Christmas and their higher numbers in society are going to naturally translate into a higher cultural profile for their festivities, but that doesn’t absolve the majority from its responsibility to recognize and strive to accommodate the sensibilities of other, non-Christian communities and traditions. When that responsibility to be open to diversity is systematically neglected, otherwise innocent ex…
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…eople in attendance. After one member sang an original song, “God Save the USA,” accompanied by a video montage blending patriotism with images of Jesus and the Bible, Federer took the stage. Though he calls himself a historian, he has no training in that field nor does he have any education or expertise in Islam or the Qur’an. Federer, who has a bachelor’s degree in accounting/business administration from Saint Louis University and an Honorary Do…
Read More…emberlin, Incoming President of the National Council of Churches of Christ USA, Dr. Sharon E. Watkins, the General Minister and President of Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada, and Melissa Rogers, the Director of Wake Forest University Divinity School’s Center for Religion and Public Affairs. What’s troubling about their signatures, however, is that each of them sits on President Obama’s advisory council for the…
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…ss of life as a gift of God.” (emphasis added). Keith Mason, of Personhood USA, extrapolated from the recent Massachusetts case, in which a judge ordered a bipolar woman to undergo an abortion and sterilization, to claim that there is a “growing” eugenics movement in America. (The judge’s decision, it should be noted, was reversed, and has not, you might have noticed, blossomed into a growing eugenics movement.) Gingrich took the question quite se…
Read More…en they were unjust, and subjected himself to them meekly. Not exactly a crusading culture warrior, then. Is truthful;—High marks here. Jesus never was a liar. “Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No”; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” Hates covetousness.—Again, Jesus does well by this measure, having a strong anti-covetousness platform. On the other hand, he does have an explicitly redistributionist economic program. No word on ho…
Read More…e again.” That was Rev. Janie Spahr’s reaction as the Presbyterian Church (USA) lodged new charges against her for performing same-sex marriages. Spahr has been in this hot seat before. She’s been in and out of trouble for presiding over ceremonies for same-sex couples since 2006. The worst punishment she has received was a rebuke in 2008… “the lightest possible punishment.” Church authorities decided that since the marriages were “not marriages,…
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…front of nearby St. John’s Church. That photo op, according to polling by USA Today and CNN, would be described later as a “defining moment.” Much has already been said about the photo op. Trump didn’t say a prayer, didn’t go into the church, didn’t do much of anything worthy of a president who enjoys a commanding influence over the country’s large and politically powerful bloc of white evangelical Christians. But not much has been said of what h…
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…bama/History made 4 Nov 2008, a Taliban Muslim illegally elected president USA Hussein” The sign is outside the church of Pastor James David Manning, who once held a trial declaring Obama ineligible to be president because he says he wasn’t born in the US and who refers to him as a “pimp” and “long-legged mack daddy” in sermons. Before her Twitter feed removed the photo from her favorites, Gawker took a screen capture here. Palin, as usual, first…
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…n the media: “Study suggests ‘born again’ believers have smaller brains” (USA Today) “Study suggests ‘born again’ believers have smaller brains” (Beliefnet) “Born-again Christians have smaller brains” (Houston Chronicle) In fact, that’s a somewhat selective list of stories on the findings of a highly selective study. Involving less than three hundred people, the study looked at the brain volume of a group of people it divvied up accor…
Read More…on Lively’s enterprises, see “Postcards From the Edge: Crackpot Anti-Gay Crusader Goes Global” (http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/oped/1183/postcards_from_the_edge%3A_crackpot_anti-gay_crusader_goes_global). Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, a new book by Nathanial Frank, “[d]raw[s] on decades of research on gay service and hundreds of exclusive interviews with policymakers, government officials,…
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