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“I Was a Wild Man”: How to Decode Evangelical Testimony

By Eric C. Miller

…. He dropped out of school and spent the next five years partying on South Beach, trying to pick up girls and getting high. “I was a wild man. I lived a no-holds-barred lifestyle,” Tchividjian said. “If I believed it would bring me maximum pleasure in the moment, I did it, no matter what it was.” Eventually, he said, he bottomed out. He arrived home late one night, coming down from a high, and literally fell to the floor. “God, I have tried my bes…

Ihram: Dressing for the King

By Amina Wadud

…is worn by the men. They have two plain white clothes (about the size of a beach towel) which they wear. One piece is wrapped around their lower half, like a sarong or skirt, and the other piece either goes over one shoulder and under the arm on the opposite side, or, is sometimes draped over both shoulders. At certain points along the way with the hajj rites, they are supposed to change from right shoulder covered to left shoulder covered. It’s v…

Text of Terror: A Bill Granting LGBT Citizens Equal Rights Evokes Biblical Citation

By Nick Street

…stcard is a meager substitute for the direct experience of a sunset on the beach at Santa Monica, I no longer imagine that the biblical hodgepodge of primitive tribal taboo and secondhand revelation captures the wonder and full meaning of the cosmos as it unfolds all around (and through) me. But like Scott Renfroe, Chris Buttars, Sally Kern and their tens of millions of fellow travelers, I still clutch old habits of mind that cloud over creation a…

Cozy Cottage or House on Fire? Thomas Kinkade’s Theo-Aesthetic Legacy

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…nt by Ester Wells, director of a Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery in Pismo Beach, CA: “It’s crazy beautiful. We’re struggling with our own emotions, yet the public is coming in and just buying art off the wall.” Beauty. Emotion. Buying. Kinkade pulled together religion, art, and commerce to sell a feeling. A Theo-Aesthetic Kinkade sold a great many of these feelings through some curious approaches to painting and a shrewd business distribution sys…

For International Human Rights Day, a Snapshot of LGBT Rights from the Vatican to Cape Town

By Peter Montgomery

…ration within a year; among early signers are religious leaders like Foley Beach, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America; Catholic Bishop Emmanuel Badejo of Ojo, Nigeria; Lawrence Khongy, pastor of Faith Community Baptist Church in Singapore; and Orthodox Priest Josiah Trenham, a California-based World Congress of Families speaker. According to a report on the right-wing Breitbart site: The International Organization for the Family (IO…

Mark Driscoll vs John MacArthur: Battle of the Self-Promoting Calvinists

By Rob Shryock

…him, John MacArthur is an old school fundamentalist whose church draws over 8000 weekly attendees. He also believes all Charismatics are blasphemers, and ultimately hell-bound, which is the premise of his Strange Fire conference, based on his recent book of the same name. MacArthur spent the conference denouncing the prosperity gospel, the social gospel, charismatics…so basically, everyone except him and his ever-shrinking group of friends. Drisco…

In This Week’s LGBT Recap: Are Gay Priests Overdue for a Stonewall Moment?

By Peter Montgomery

…ipated in World Congress of Families summits. Also listed as signers are a number of religious leaders, including Foley Beach, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America; Catholic Bishop Emmanuel Badejo of Ojo, Nigeria; Lawrence Khongy, pastor of Faith Community Baptist Church in Singapore; and Josiah Trenham, an Orthodox priest who has spoken repeatedly at World Congress of Families gatherings. Vatican: Commentary on gay priest ban; tim…

Huckabee Says Obama is “Pretending to Be a Christian”

By Carlos Wilton

…an submarine. Recalling the Spanish conquistadores’ arrival on a Caribbean beach, that romantic gesture symbolizes Russia’s territorial claim to vast swaths of Arctic seabed. Caught in the spotlight of a deep-sea robotic submersible, the tiny Russian flag looks ridiculous: a childish, king-of-the-hill gesture on the part of Vladimir Putin. But it embodies something far more ominous. So, too, with a remark Presidential candidate Michael Huckabee ma…

Beloved Immortals: Science, Miracles and ‘Jellyfish Time’

By Beatrice Marovich

…e makes me want to visit this guy in his laboratory, take a walk along the beach where he searches for evidence of sea creature activity, watch him sing karaoke at an academic conference. And yet, something about Kubota’s story leaves me unsettled. Call it my inner rationalist or my inner existentialist. Call it what you like, but I’m wary of a scientist who harbors (and who publicly exposes) such passionate feelings about something like immortali…

What Romney Didn’t Tell You about Mormonism at the RNC

By Joanna Brooks

I spent my Labor Day on the beach at Coronado—home to the North Island Naval Station—with two military families we count among our closest friends. As we watched our kids play jump rope with kelp strands, a friend recalled something Mitt Romney left out of his keynote address to last week’s Republican National Convention. “No mention of the men and women deployed in Afghanistan,” she said, echoing a concern voiced by conservative commentators lik…