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Toward a Non-Malignant Faith: An Interview with Brian McLaren

By Peter Laarman

…mating the difficulties but I really am calling for more trust in the Holy Spirit. Which to me doesn’t mean avoiding responsibility but instead means exercising great care about the change we need—balancing courage with humility, and boldness with gentleness—all fruits of the Spirit. Most essential is making sure we use just means toward just ends, not bullying or demonizing anyone. It should be possible, it must be possible, to employ non-hostile…

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…at a crossroads in history—we can choose to move forward into new emerging spiritualities, or we can heed the siren sound of the traditionalists calling us back to a romanticized, rigid, past. We are not passive observers, Bass writes, but active participants in shaping what’s to come. Bass herself has been at the forefront of the emergent spirituality movement, with books like Christianity for the Rest of Us (2007) and A People’s History of Chris…

Homophobia an “Atrocity,” LDS Bishop Tells Gay Mormon Conference

By Joanna Brooks

…bian people have gone through, I quoted a scripture in Zechariah [Zechariah 13:6] where someone—who Mormons interpret as Christ—comes and shows wounds, and he says, “I was wounded in the house of my friends.” I used that imagery to characterize the scars of gay and lesbian people. I know it’s strong imagery. I just feel really mournful about what they have been through. All of these realizations are very new to me, and it’s still quite raw. I was…

Religious Leaders Pressure Congress To Support Religious Discrimination

By Sarah Posner

…odriguez believes evangelicals need to “repudiate the spirit of Herod, the spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah, the spirit of Jezebel.” Both believe taxpayer dollars can help support such beliefs — since, by signing the letter, they’ve indicated that an evangelical organization receiving federal faith-based grants could decline to hire someone who shared those views, or who might be one of those evil, wicked people. “Religious organizations desiring such…

Gay Rights, an Evangelical Thing?

By Janet Edwards

…ath and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It means that LGBT Christians have the same place at Christ’s table as anyone else. The chorus of the praise song, “We Are One in the Spirit,” echoes Paul (Galatians 5:22) when it repeats the refrain, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” It is in this Spirit that we can “out-evangelize the ev…

The Heresy of End Times Predictions

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…modern sense. That is why certain later people are identified by this same Spirit to be the elected readers for their generation, offered a way to crack the hidden codes of divine scripture. In most cases, the very belief that a given reader of the Apocalypse had been divinely appointed carried with it the clear implication that those times must be very close. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need such a close and spiritually esoteric reading at all. If tha…

‘Biblical’ Disaster in Haiti: Pat Robertson and the Curse of Unyielding Ignorance

By Matt Recla

…es it pretty clear that vengeance is his business and not ours. (See Romans 12:19–21). In a few brief moments, Robertson managed to flush over two thousand years of Judeo-Christian teachings down the toilet. As I witnessed that notorious segment on The 700 Club, my “judge not that you not be judged” button got jammed. I’m trying to fix it, but it keeps short-circuiting on me. Maybe I’m not being Christlike, but I get pretty ticked when a brother i…

Magic In the Daylight

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…a hard time with the example of Quesalid, a shamanic healer who sucks the “spirit” of the disease; anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss knows the “spirit” is fake, but the healing seems to work. Anyway, the unseen world is presumed to exist, just out of sight, and certain people have the power to make it seen. Spirits can be reached out to as a source of wisdom, maybe sort of like the Internet. And like the Internet, the unseen world doesn’t necessa…

Newt Gingrich Visits the “Holy Ghost Bartender”

By Sarah Posner

…high-energy, racially-mixed church in Temple Terrace he founded in December 1996. Nearly 1,000 people spend about four hours in a service led by “the Holy Ghost bartender,” as he is known. Here, he serves the new wine of Christ, and they get drunk with joy. It’s not uncommon for worshipers to break into uncontrollable “holy laughter,” shaking with mirth, dancing in the aisles or falling to the ground. They say they are “slain in the spirit.” The m…

LGBT’s, Opponents Prep for Vatican Synod; UN Rights Council Adopts LGBT Resolution; Brazil’s Evangelicals Eye Presidency; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…other religious organisations, ones that not only do not know of the Holy Spirit, but are in some cases adamantly opposed to the existence and enlivening effect of any such thing. Such leaders would rather fence themselves round with all the trappings of “religion” than spread the Good News of the One who has relativized all religious formalities in order to bring us into a new humanity starting from the rejected and precarious. PinkNews reports…