Religion Dispatches
…en you start of your regular day something sits like some a canceled movie ticket in lump on the top of your stomach. You belch a lot and it reeks of what ever this lump was made of, all morning long if not all day. On the other hand, the third day is the day your body starts to accept that it is fasting, requiring less food. Anyone prone to headaches those first two days due to severe drops in blood sugar and dehydration will be over it now and s…
Read More…— they want to go see Allah, I’m all in favor of giving them a first class ticket if — if they don’t respect human life and dignity. What Jesus is getting at, Mr. Hannity, is that those who truly have respect for human life and dignity understand that it is better to love an enemy than it is to hate them and wish for (or facilitate) their destruction. Hannity is no better than the fanatics he condemns since has no respect for their lives or their…
Read More…candidate. Reacting to a possible Cruz nomination, the 92 year-old Dole this week warned of “cataclysmic” losses for the GOP with the “extremist” Senator at the top of the ticket. But which of the other candidates could get realistically get the nomination? “I think it’s Trump,” said Dole. …
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…rian history, with more splits and divorces than those in a Trump-Gingrich ticket). Put more simply, most large evangelical denominations effectively have a blue church/red church divide. The schism was also a direct result of resistance from various churches in the 1960s to being told by Presbyterian leadership to admit African Americans into their congregations. The story here—focusing on Memphis as a case study—is told in gripping detail in Ste…
Read More…social issues and foreign policy, according to the study. This year, that number rose to about a third of all self-described traditional evangelicals. According to the survey, even though they are apparently concerned more about the economy than what other people do in their bedrooms, most traditional evangelicals will vote to continue the failed Republican policies that have led to the current ruin of the U.S. economy: The study also found that,…
Read More…ge’s Dena’iana Center will have to fork over anywhere from $73 for a basic ticket to $255 for a special meet-and-greet. Since these Fox favorites failed to designate how these funds will be spent, here’s a selection of potential charities taken from Charity Navigator’s “Listing of 10 Non-Profits That Make Ebenezer Proud”: * American Association of State Troopers, Association for Disabled Firefighters * California Organization of Police and Sheriff…
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…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…
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…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…
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…l I could no longer live with it. Then, one day while I was talking on the phone in a dark room, just like that, I shed my belief in a literal “first couple.” Strangely, I don’t remember who I was talking to or what the conversation was about, but all at once I understood and it felt great. Yet my childhood belief had provided protection for me and had given shape to my understanding of God and even of myself, and what did I have to replace it wit…
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…ere not companionship-based. They were economic arrangements. Okay, that’s number 1. Number 2, let’s say that your wife didn’t provide you with a male offspring. A man could take another wife and another wife and another wife until one of them did. This is the “sanctity of marriage” that is being protected. Are you kidding me? Wow. Okay, so that’s Old Testament. Then along comes Jesus. Well for those of us who follow Jesus, I always like to point…
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