Religion Dispatches
…nvestigation, launched by Sen. Chuck Grassley, in 2007. The investigation took more than three years but ultimately produced nothing in terms of government oversight. Instead, after pressure from the religious right, the Committee opted for “self-reform” within churches. How has that worked out? I first became acquainted with Munsey’s shtick in that little Georgia studio when I was working on my book, when he was the opening act for another later…
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…itself thousands of times to thousands of different contexts. It has withstood challenges far more severe than evolution or the emboldened atheism of the 21st century. It will do so again. Christianity is Not Just about Jesus Dying for Our Sins A second excerpt is taken from further along in the comment, in a section that deals with questions of human uniqueness: Perhaps some religions can be compatible with evolution and the closing of the gulf b…
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…orld”) known as the Georgia Guidestones. The monument consists of four 16-foot-high slabs of granite arranged around a central column and topped with a capstone weighing 25,000 pounds. Carved onto the face of each slab is a list of ten precepts for creating a better society, written in eight modern languages. On the four sides of the capstone are written the words, “Let These Be Guidestones to An Age of Reason” in Sanskrit, Babylonian cuneiform, C…
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…urch in Henderson, Kentucky, Pastor Lisa Bourland is seated on the prayer room floor washing the feet of speakers for that evening’s Women, Weapons of Warfare (WWW) conference. Behind her is a blank movie screen (a reminder that the building once housed the six-theater Old Orchard Cinema) and a panoramic photograph of Bethlehem, flanked by both the Israeli and American flags. The stars of this Stars and Stripes, however, have been replaced with th…
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…Islamic world has been their moral appeal. These activists thought only bloodshed would create political change, and only the jihadi ideology of cosmic warfare—based on Muslim history and Qur’anic verses—provided the moral legitimacy for the struggle. Ideologists such as Abd al-Salam Farad and Ayman al-Zawahiri have written as if violent struggle—including ruthless attacks of terrorism on civilian populations—was the only form of struggle that wa…
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…Life Church flew to Mali and began furtively anointing entire towns with cooking oil. The strangeness of it gripped Dutch missionary René Holvast, who later wrote: “It was confusing and produced a growing uneasiness. It did not seem to fit our current evangelical theological and anthropological textbooks.” The team from Haggard’s church was a forerunner in a missionary wave that has washed over the world since the early 1990s, bringing what Holva…
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…cre Law enforcement officials continue to investigate last Sunday’s mass shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Florida and sort through a complex of potential motivations. Although the shooter called a local emergency number during the attack to pledge his allegiance to ISIS, news reports have suggested that there is to date no evidence of any connection to the group. ISIS officials have encouraged supporters to launch attacks in their home countries d…
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…er or not to change the discriminatory language in the church’s official “Book of Discipline” that deems “homosexuality to be incompatible with Christian teachings.” This exclusive brand of Christianity is not the one that my mother subscribes to, nor the one that I was raised with. Thanks in part to pioneers like my mother, who have tirelessly championed a more progressive kind of faith, there is a growing movement of liberal Christians within th…
Read More…he list of Republican presidential hopefuls, “dominionism” has garnered a good bit of media attention—Michelle Goldberg’s piece “A Christian Plot for Domination?” at the Daily Beast, Ryan Lizza’s piece “The Transformation of Michele Bachmann” at The New Yorker, and a piece at the Texas Observer, “Rick Perry’s Army of God,” by Forrest Wilder. The increase in coverage of the religious right’s longterm strategy to transform American culture has led…
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…d its ban on using deadly force. From that point on, the police and army troops and have been openly firing into crowds. The unconfirmed death toll is presently at well over 100. Hundreds of Tibetans have also been arrested and are being detained in jails and in the interrogation centers of the Public Security Bureau. The media has tended to focus only on the political dimension of the protests. This is understandable, given that it is the most dr…
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