Religion Dispatches
…specializing in sharing and answering prayer requests deliver followers to portals (like this and this) where the nature of the relief sought can be made known without a specific petition appearing next to your avatar. While some accounts, such as @request_prayers and its affiliated site www.prayerrequest.com, are crowdsourced, others have volunteer prayer teams standing by. @OurPrayer, the prayer request handle for Guideposts magazine, offers a d…
Read More…Lifeway for the Southern Baptist Convention, that shows 64% say it’s “inevitable” that marriage equality will be the law of the land one day soon. Majorities also believe that “homosexuality is a civil rights issue,” and that landlords and rental halls should not be able to discriminate against gays and lesbians. The worst finding, though, for ex-gay organizations seeking to “pray away the gay” is this one: ”More Americans do not believe homosexu…
Read More…issing a small Brazilian flag. Young Tongan men stand squarely in groups, palming thick books of LDS scripture, wearing tupenu—traditional calf-length linen wraparound skirts–with their white shirts and ties. Gauntlets of young locals in dark suits line walkways on the north side of Temple Square, cheerfully singing hymns from the screens of their iPhones or from green-backed hymnals, while a clutch of protestors—evangelical Christians, mostly, th…
Read More…ed that “Going forward with a civil lawsuit does not in any way prevent criminal actions—perhaps may even make it more likely.” The personal and organizational fallout for SGM and in the churches named as defendants—aside from legal consequences—remains to be seen. The second amended lawsuit named well-known, long-time members as well as a former pastor at CLC as perpetrators, and added graphic detail to previous accuasations that Covenant Life Ch…
Read More…Can both sides be right or wrong at the same time? It is clear that political allegiances are driving the current situation in Egypt, even though such allegiances are frequently cloaked in highly emotive religious idiom. Despite the charged religious rhetoric on both sides, at the end of the day, the principal actors in this unfolding tragedy are motivated mostly bypolitical power. Many of us who study Islamic thought have been taken aback by the…
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…perfect sacrifice: “They told me, be a murderer, be a rapist, be a war criminal, but never be an atheist. That is the worst crime ever from their point of view.” The theology of witness But what was their evidence? I asked. “They don’t have any evidence against me. They just searched some blog posts that were written by some Jamaat-Shibir activists and put it in the charge sheet. The links were fake and few of them were photoshopped. They just…
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…Let’s pray that stands.) When Saddam Hussein was our ally, he unleashed chemical weapons on Kurds at Halabja, the only confirmed instance of a Muslim regime using chemical weapons. Even considering the possibility of Assad’s use of chemical weapons in his brutal war against his own people—supported by supposedly ‘Islamic’ actors, such as Iran and Hezbollah—still, nothing was invented. A Muslim world that lacks in groundbreaking scientific research…
Read More…faithlessness; and yes, there is arguably a lesson about the dangers of temporal authority. But Hovind sees this passage as a quite literal message about low taxes and small government. You won’t find any mention of camels and needles in Godonomics, nor any substantive reference to Jesus’s love for the despised and the downtrodden. Hovind, in fact, takes a dim view of the poor. Although he acknowledges that “poverty is caused by a myriad of extern…
Read More…inars. Incuriosity may be a flaw in a journalist, but Heffernan’s bigger sin is to speak flippantly (not humorously, or cleverly, or angrily, but flippantly; with intellect but no care) about ideas that matter deeply to people. And that’s something no writer should do—especially when talking about religion. Then again, it’s never wise to take trolls too seriously. Heffernan has clearly mastered a strategy that’s been used by plenty of anti-evolut…
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…e Gods with the sort of unexpected intensity that comes once in centuries. Flash flooding, landslides, and rising waters stranded tens of thousands of visitors and destroyed roads, buildings, livelihoods, and bridges. It is too early to know how many people have died but the number will probably be in the thousands. The numbers may be low compared to global-scale disasters of recent years, but there is a wrenching poignancy to what is happening in…
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