Religion Dispatches
…ential material,” said Mpofu. “Oh yeah,” echoes Bourland. “In my heart, I just begin to pray, God, let this woman rise to this place that you want her to go,” said Mpofu. “Number one, she’s a Christian. Number two, she’s a woman.” Watch a short video montage of the conference here. —Ed….
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…church since the Protestant Reformation. That’s what we’re dealing with. X number of megablocks of Christianity, each with Y millions of Christians. Categories of Christianity zoom from the left onto Peter Wagner’s huge blue WLI classroom screen, bouncing slightly for effect as they hit the right edge of the screen before rebounding to center. There’s one little block of 20 million or so, explains Wagner, which includes Mormons and Jehovah’s Witne…
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…nt and the destruction of national sovereignty and religion. A significant number of Christian dispensationalists subscribe to this view and believe that the New World Order was foretold in the Book of Revelation. In 2005, Mark Dice (using the pseudonym “John Connor” in reference to the Terminator film franchise) organized a Christian group opposed to the New World Order called “The Resistance” and began a campaign to have the monument destroyed….
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…immigration. But the more I learned, the more I realized that the kind of really abrupt fall-off in birthrates that we’re seeing in countries like Poland, Italy, and Japan has very serious consequences for the future, and in Europe, it may threaten some things liberals really cherish, like generous welfare states. You briefly mention loaded terms like “female genital mutilation” and “female feticide.” Can you talk a little bit about the choice of…
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…I also think the “emotional tone scale” is useful, but only if you use it really carefully because it can be really manipulative and dangerous. You write that you realized the tone scale was a great way to recruit people. I was temporarily assigned to the post of Director of Promotion. At the time, I didn’t have anything to promote, so I just read books by [Hubbard]—these were the only books I was really allowed to read. The man was obsessive abo…
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…y determined that by this fact of ancestral anthropology alone, then I was really Muslim. As one friend put it, “You are really one of us.” So I take another approach (no surprises there). I reason that if the prophet was already 40 years old before he received the first Qur’anic revelation, and then he died after the last at age 63, then historically speaking he was only Muslim for 23 years. Any person who chooses Islam and remains faithful for m…
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…ys Mark was the first Internet age megachurch celebrity pastor and leading number one podcasts, number one sermon downloads, those kinds of things. So what that did is, elevated Mark to the stratosphere so quickly, whereas you might think…typically they may take 20-30 years of faithful ministry, but the Internet just propelled things with such rapidity, and the Internet only sees how you speak, that’s all the Internet is, it’s all about verbal art…
Read More…have been a helpful tidbit for Wills’s column. But if there’s no time for phone calls or web searches, well, at the very least, there are fact-checkers. And here’s a modest proposal for the editors at the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and every other publication that will be running a lot of Mormon content this campaign season but has no Mormons on its editorial staff: Hire a Mormon fact checker. There are a number of advanced g…
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…fight. If someone had pressed into his fingers at that pivotal moment the phone number for The Trevor Project, he might reach out and hear a voice of reassurance, a voice that gave him hope for life by, in part, repudiating the so-called biblical teaching that who he is amounts to an offense against God. If he’d had a sense of belonging to a community that embraced him for who he is, maybe his hope wouldn’t be so fully shattered. But while other…
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…hey still cared for me. And I can’t tell you how many times I remember the phone call she made and the letter he sent. To the rest of you, those I potlucked with, laughed with, held your hands, loved your babies, went to your weddings, your sickbeds, your moments of crisis: Where are you? Why have you let me go to what you believe to be perdition? Are you just too busy? Did I never matter that much? Have I fooled myself believing we were bonded fo…
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