Religion Dispatches
A headline caught my eye this morning: “Indiana’s Largest Megachurch Faces New Foreclosure Proceedings.” It made me think of Steve Munsey, an Indiana prosperity preacher I watched in a Decatur, Georgia television studio in 2007, pleading for audience members and viewers to give their money to the Trinity Broadcasting Network. As it turns out, the story is about Munsey’s church, Family Christian Center, which claims to have a weekly attendance of…
Read MoreA 2008 hidden-camera video of a perturbed Mitt Romney discussing Mormonism with an ultra-conservative Iowa talk radio host named Jan Mickelson started making the rounds again late last week, and now, according to Politico.com, it has gone “viral.” Prickly and irritated, Romney pushes back when Mickelson challenges him on his view of the end-times and whether Jesus Christ will reign from Jerusalem or a New Jerusalem in the Americas. “I understand…
Read MorePat Robertson isn’t the only evangelical leader who frets about all the kids dressing up in satanic garb for Halloween, or as he calls it, the “festival of the Devil.” Mission America’s Linda Harvey recently argued that the holiday’s satanic origins explain its appeal to “the LGBT world.” Here are a few options religious right leaders would like you to consider. Jesusween. The folks at www.Jesusween.com are hoping to turn Halloween into a “Christ…
Read More
In the relatively calm seas of the Christian media, a storm has erupted between Christianity Today, arguably the mouthpiece of contemporary American evangelicalism, and the Christian Post, a smaller competitor. At the center of the storm is David Jang, a popular preacher in East Asia but a relatively unknown figure in the United States, who has ties to the late Rev. Moon’s Unification Church and, according to sources in a recent Christianity Toda…
Read More
When I first heard that a white supremacist opened fire on a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin a few weeks ago, I froze. My stomach lurched and my thoughts turned to the friends I’d made in the Sikh community through my work as an atheist and interfaith activist. In the wake of the horror I reached out to friends directly and logged on to Twitter to express my shock, outrage, disgust, and sadness—as a Millennial, I suppose you could say this…
Read More
On July 20, just after James Holmes wounded 58 and killed 12 people at the opening of the latest Batman film at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, The Telegraph published a “history of mass shootings in the U.S. since Columbine”—a list of nearly 30 shooting sprees with lethal results. Ne’er-do-wells who merely wounded didn’t make the cut. Thus, not included on the list was a shooting spree in an Alabama bar with a multiple arson warm-up just two…
Read MoreSparked by a Richard Dawkins tweet, in which he drew a parallel between Islamists and (yawn) Nazis, Nathan Lean recently suggested on Salon.com that the most famous representatives of the new atheism “flirt with” Islamophobia [echoing Chris Stedman’s prescient warning to fellow atheists on RD this past August]. As the article explains, Dawkins, Hitchens, and their ilk have had a gleeful decade of “intellectual triumphalism” directed against the r…
Read More
When men don’t fear God, they give themselves to evil. This was clearly the case in the latest mass murder. —Ray Comfort As many of us are struggling to find a reason or reasons for the Aurora, Colorado theater shootings in the early morning of Friday, July 20, there is no shortage of pundits offering their own explanations. Maybe the alleged shooter, James Holmes, was depressed after scoring low on exams in his PhD program at the University of C…
Read MoreI am a scholar of religion by profession, but I like to play in technology. So when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for generic top level domains (gTLD) like .com, .org., and .net, asked for proposals for new gTLD, I watched with some fascination. One of the earliest discussions was around allowing “.xxx” to indicate pornography-related sites. However, I am interested in a new round of names…
Read MoreThe Uganda Joint Christian Council, which includes Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox bishops, has called on parliament to move the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill forward. According to the Ugandan newspaper The Daily Monitor: Top religious leaders from across the country have asked Parliament to speed-up the process of enacting the Anti-Homosexuality law to prevent what they called “an attack on the Bible and the institution of marriage.” Speaki…
Read More