Religion Dispatches
…against wimpy Christians who are more concerned about pastoral care than becoming an army of “warriors” dedicated to bringing about “kingdom rule” on the earth. Don’t despair if you can’t make it to Dallas, you can watch online starting at 7 p.m. Central. But if your kids really like candy, you can comfort yourself with the approach to Halloween taken by Mars Hill church, the authoritarian megachurch phenomenon associated with hipster homophobe Ma…
Read More
…tion.” “The reasons for that were multi-fold,” he says, “but they were not compelling… not reasons that would have led us to postpone or kill the story.” Repeated requests for comment from the Christian Post went unanswered, though I was eventually informed that the Post’s editor, Michelle Vu, who authored the August 17 response, had “politely decline[d]” my request. Instead, I was provided with a brief statement: “Christianity Today wrote an art…
Read More
…e Old and New Testaments, supports the search for truth and a constant overcoming of the self, overcoming what you used to be. Christ didn’t associate with prostitutes for nothing. He said, ‘I help those who have gone astray and forgive them’ but for some reason I can’t see any of that at our trial, which is taking place under the banner of Christianity. I think the prosecutor is defying Christianity. The lawyer wants nothing to do with the injure…
Read More…dments on display in front of the Bradford County Courthouse. How did this come about? As reported by news4jax.com: American Atheists had sued to have the aforementioned Ten Commandments monument taken down, and in an effort to mediate, the county asked the monument’s sponsoring group, the Community Men’s Fellowship, to remove it—but the group refused. Rather than incur the expense involved in dismantling this 5-foot, 6-ton stone slab, Bradford Co…
Read More
…my own discomfort on the morning of the Oak Creek attack: https://twitter.com/edrescherphd/status/232208487675994112 The common denominator Others have seen religious intolerance as a central feature in many recent mass killings. Mark Juergensmeyer recently discussed the ways in which certain religious narratives meld seamlessly with notions of violence and war. The image of cosmic, religious war, he notes, can been seen at the center of both Isl…
Read More
…the University of Colorado. Or he must have had a rough upbringing. Or the common refrain: he’s simply psychotic, and no verifiable reason for the shooting will ever be discovered. The responses from religious commentators, scholars, and pastors have a similar range. Shootings like this will continue because of our increasing desensitization to violent images, one Patheos blogger argued, while another evangelical commentator believes that this act…
Read More…onolith, and there is no universally recognized religious leadership, it becomes hard for someone to come forward to act as a gatekeeper. Even if there were Catholic-style hierarchy, you can imagine the type of games that could be played with granting access to use of the domain. For example, would nuns invested in social justice be allowed to register under “.catholic”? In the case of Muslims, we don’t know who is registering these gTLD and to w…
Read More…d that the death penalty would be removed in committee. “However,” notes a commentary on Care2.com, “readers familiar with the legislation’s history will know that such assurances have been made before only for the bill to go to the voting stage intact and without the death sentence deleted.” Also still in the bill: A 7-year jail sentence for consenting adults who have gay sex; A life sentence for people in same-sex marriages; Extradition and pros…
Read More…s have nothing to do with scripture, and America is not a theocracy, no matter how hard some of its citizens may try to make it so. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy…
Read More
…amily Research Council president Tony Perkins on April 30. Hoffman’s op-ed combines two common narratives about Chen and the Obama administration that have become popular on anti-abortion websites; that the Obama administration has betrayed Chen because it values economic cooperation over human rights; and that the administration is refusing to help Chen because it supports the forced abortions that Chen opposes. The Perfect Dog Whistle A bookend…
Read More