Religion Dispatches
…ng they led somewhere from which he could make a dramatic reentry onto the stage. Instead, he trots back down and resumes preaching, undeterred. Munsey continues to implore the audience to part with its money. “God said, don’t come empty-handed,” he warns. In other words, give. The audience is shouting out praise, and people are filling out their envelopes. This seems far-fetched on television, but in person, many people are having genuine spiritu…
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…f Weird Georgia), shortly after the Guidestones were unveiled, a local minister stated his suspicion that “Mr. Christian is not a Christian” and that the monument was designed for the worship of the sun as well as the devil. Contemporary Pagans, UFO buffs, and New Agers were naturally attracted by the mystery of the site. New myths were created that the monument was built upon a “power-nexus” or a place sacred to Native Americans. One legend holds…
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…e with her status as “Christian music artist,” she became the genre’s biggest star between 1998 and 2002, when—citing burnout—she walked away from the industry. Eight years later, Knapp returned with a mainstream rock album called Letting Go. And she came out publicly as a lesbian [as Douglas Harrison covered at that time, here on RD –Eds.]. Recently, I caught up with Knapp to discuss what motivated her to return to music and what she struggles wi…
Read More…Christians, or Jews, but there the choices end. There is little by way of statistics for American Muslims as Muslims, so it is hard to tell whether there are just more Muslim women than men, whether there are fewer Muslim men because they may marry outside the faith (or because some men do marry abroad, traveling to their parents’ birthplaces to enter arranged marriages). But what we do know is that there are large numbers of single, bright, arti…
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…the static quo. I’m not going all the way to hope, as the conference has just started. But I am feeling resilient, which is different from hopeful. It is enjoyment of the periphery, where we are suspicious of any of the insiders who imagine they are the human center, which they are not. Those inside who know resilience are surely our friends. Day Two Day Two for us, Day 5 for the Talks, found us involved with a man high up on a light pole, wavin…
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…nimals are ultimately the same. This calls for at least three comments. First, Christianity is in fact compatible with evolution and the “closing of the gulf between humans and other animals.” There are many extraordinarily intelligent Christians who have freely admitted that evolution poses challenges to Christian theology and have freely chosen to not ignore them or sweep them under the rug. They have a deep knowledge of Christian history and th…
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…was it that made you want to become a minister? Well, my dad was a Methodist minister and I grew up in the church. My dad died when I was 7 years old and I remember that when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say I wanted to be a minister. They’d smile politely because everybody knew that little girls couldn’t be ministers. I learned not to answer that. By the time I went off to college I was planning to be a teacher…
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…ted U.S. intelligence services “to cease all wiretapping of alleged terrorist phone calls unless they first obtained a specific court warrant for each case.” Captured overseas terrorists are no longer given military tribunals but are “now given full trials in the U.S. court system.” The relaxing of the Bush Administration’s rules of engagement with terrorists has led to the explosion of “terrorist bombs in two large and two small U.S. cities, kill…
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…n Africa, and some of us tend to draw a very stark picture of Muslims against Christians. Can you help us better understand the religious dynamics of peace and war in Kadugli and more broadly in Sudan? The issue is complex and has more to do with Arabization: some Arabs imposing their own culture on black people, refusing, denying other black cultures. In some learning institutions and schools in Sudan, there is little or no history of black peopl…
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…hat Zawahiri was wrong. In a couple of weeks of protests, the peaceful resistors demonstrated the moral and strategic legitimacy of nonviolent struggle. And they succeeded, where years of jihadi bloodshed had not produced a single political change. Now that bin Ladin is dead, does this mean that al Qaeda is also finished, and the radical struggles of jihad will fizzle into history? Perhaps, in part. It is unlikely, however, that the al Qaeda organ…
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