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Bishops vs. Nuns: Who Spoke for God in 2010?

By Eugene McMullan

…gainst Sr. Margaret McBride of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix when, as a member of the hospital’s ethics committee, she gave her consent to a theraputic abortion for a 27-year-old mother of four. As a result, Bishop Thomas Olmstead declared an “automatic” excommunication for McBride, and just recently succeeded in forcing St. Joseph’s to renounce its Catholic affiliation. The black-and-white thinking of Bp. Olmstead says that…

Are Evangelicals Sweetness and Light or Enablers of Cruelty and Racism? Gender Roles Hint at an Answer

By Kristin Kobes Du Mez

…” “Our lovely second lady Karen Pence” then took her place behind the microphone, and she was masterful. Poised and powerful, she spoke of her “good friend Melania Trump,” and she assured those in attendance that the Trump administration “stands for the values of faith, family, and the sanctity of life.” And, she boasted, the very next day Trump would be nominating a woman to the Supreme Court. Pence hit key talking points, one after another: Trum…

Will Religion Finally Give Peace a Chance? Rising to the Challenge of Nonviolence as Armageddon Looms

By Peter Laarman

…final step is joining Gandhi and his followers in marching to the sea for salt—and in that way withdrawing consent from the British Raj by refusing to consume the colonists’ salt. The final step is taking the risk to live the life of a nonviolent grassroots organizer, rich in friendships, and eventually rich in memories, but far from comfortable in the conventional middle-class sense of comfort. Again, and to be clear, I have been arguing here th…

No, Rush Limbaugh Did Not Hijack Your Parents’ Christianity

By Kristin Kobes Du Mez

…d James Dobson as part of the background noise. In 2016, when overwhelming numbers of white evangelicals backed Donald Trump, it seemed that Limbaugh had the edge over Dobson when it came to discipling white evangelicals. How else could one explain the apparent betrayal of “family values” evangelicalism? Their salt-of-the-earth Christianity had been hijacked by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Except it hadn’t. At least not if hijacking entails taking…

Humanitarian Victims or Christian Martyrs: What’s in a Word?

By Donald Heinz

…he Christian Right, it can only assume that any Christian martyr worth his salt (surely an allusion to a pithy saying of Jesus) must be a Bible-smuggler who, in the name of Western hegemony, is determined to smother all exotic cultures, especially Islam, with civilizing Christianity. In fact, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and most Protestant, including evangelical, mission is defined today by a servant model. Modern Christians express their disciplesh…

Pastor of Kentucky Church Severed From Baptists Over LGBT Inclusion: Not Activism, Just Honesty

By Mike Greer

…years. I came about the time that folks from Burma began arriving in large numbers and uniting in membership with Crescent Hill, and much of my time in those early years was spent trying to figure out how in the world we might be able to be a unified body that includes people who don’t speak English, who have a completely foreign background and cultural experience. It took a lot of hard work but we reached a place a number of years ago where, whil…

London Calling: “Our Great War Is a Spiritual War”

By Elizabeth Drescher

…their psyches as inaccessible markers of meaning and status, than they are tickets to a Premier League match. A Spiritual War? This, at least, is the gist of much of the heated banter on the uprisings on the Facebook fan page of trip hop duo Massive Attack, where one fan drew something of a spiritual assessment from the film Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the m…

I Miss Tina Fey

By Julie Ingersoll

…half. There were still probably 80 empty seats, and it was clear that some number of attendees had free tickets. The largest financial supporter of the event was a local news/talk radio station and its representatives were the only media allowed in. As I arrived with my Religion Dispatches press badge they stopped me before I even got to the door. I chatted with an AP reporter and he said AP had been trying for weeks to gain media access—but that…

The Prophet Amos on Unemployment and Our Leadership

By Peter Laarman

…can’t find any job; among younger males, especially African-Americans, the number is much higher—in many areas one in two workers is without work. Yet Congress, with a Democratic majority, can’t get it together to extend unemployment benefits. Our solons just flew out of town for a weeklong holiday vacation. Republicans, joined by Democratic deficit hawks, insist that any extension be “deficit neutral” and come out of unspent stimulus money. But…

Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my parking tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of a courtesy than a necessity.” Gone, too, from Osteen’s theology is any mention of topics that might intrude on happy thoughts: Osteen avoids using current events in his messages so he doesn’t get sidetracked in controversy….