Religion Dispatches
…incredible times to live in.” Sporadically, in recent years: Church on the Rock, Pastor David Pepper According to Pastor David Pepper, Palin “frequently” attended his Wasilla megachurch, Church on the Rock, for about a year before she became governor, making this the loosest of her four church affiliations. But some of Pepper’s statements are real cause for concern, as he seems to be the most explicitly dominionist of all of the pastors in Palin’s…
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…endy claims to have come face to face with Jesus while performing with her rock band at a Durban night club. “A few days after her Damascus Road conversion,” reads her biography on the web site for her book, Journal of the Unknown Prophet, “Wendy received this prophetic word: ‘And you shall be raised up as a forerunner of creative evangelism in this generation.’ The Prophetic Call to the Media was ignited.” Unlike their forebears at TBN, the Alecs…
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…bration of the sacred event or person (because Jesus was laid to rest on a rock not in a church) but that we recognize them. Then we commemorate with awe and wonder, making that place a marker for that event or person. Our commemoration embodies our celebration of the set apart nature and bring us back to it, and thereby to the Divine. Certain places in the world have an extraordinary flavor of this sacred commemoration without the building huge e…
Read More…lican nomination. Huntsman, despite lining up a few endorsements, has made little statistical progress among New Hampshire voters. He didn’t file a quarterly report with the FEC, but his reported fundraising numbers (about $4 million, with Huntsman reportedly pitching in about half of that himself) suggest that Republican donors haven’t jumped on board the way his campaign might have hoped. Weeks ago, as his campaign bathed in a luminous media spo…
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…tion, wrote, in a 1997 op-ed in the Washington Post, of proselytizing at a rock concert in her role as then head of the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth. “Walking through the crowd I also noticed more pentagrams than crosses around the teenage necks,” she wrote, equating the necklaces with Satanism. Diane Vera cites this as an examples of O’Donnell’s “tendency to confuse Satanism with not only Wicca but also rock fan culture.” We will likel…
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…, see and survive a lot of the tragic dimensions of life. That’s why Chris Rock, who was asked about a friend of his who committed suicide because he was depressed. “Depressed?” Rock said. “What do you mean? Of course he was depressed, he was a comedian.” This is existentialism. There is that tragic sense of life that we’re able to see and comedy helps us cope. Comedy allows people to see things and actually know things that they wouldn’t be willi…
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…difference between a beaver dam and a human dam. The difference between a rock and a radio is one is invented by a human mind and one’s not. I have another word, “technium,” which I use to talk about the system of all these technologies together. A spoon or shoe does not really have any lifelike attributes, but all the technology in the world together does. If you have something like your computer mouse or iPhone, there’s ten thousand different o…
Read More…tattooed congregants from Seattle to … Calvinist doctrine cloaked in indie-rock, big screens and a worn pair of Chuck Taylors.” But none of this makes for the kind of epoch-shifting postmodern church that pop historians like Phyllis Tickle and Diana Butler Bass have described. In this “new kind” of Christianity, leaders like Bolz-Weber give their power away, while Driscoll clung fiercely to his fiefdom. Driscoll has sometimes been mislabeled as an…
Read More…offered, reminding him that while Jesus may have assigned Peter to be the rock upon which the church would be built, it was up to everyone else to determine the details. It’s fascinating to watch the young (with a smattering of older) students invent a new belief system. I give them some guidelines: their religions must include some common elements such as doctrine, dogma, symbols, music, rituals—and most importantly, reformers. A few of the grou…
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“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral,” the French poet Antoine de Saint-Exupery, wrote. When the Rev. Robert H. Schuller saw the concession stand of a southern California drive-in movie theater in 1955, his imagination bore the blueprints for a crystalline cathedral and thoroughly-modern ideas about spreading the Christian Gospel via television. Schuller, founde…
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