Religion Dispatches
…r member of Bray’s network of associates, Rachelle (“Shelly”) Shannon, a housewife from rural Oregon, had also attacked Dr. George Tiller as he drove away from his clinic in Wichita. She was arrested for attempted murder. When I interviewed Bray on several occasions in the 1990s, he provided a theological defense of this kind of violence from two different Christian perspectives. In the remainder of this essay, I’ll summarize from Terror in the Mi…
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…in New York and Philadelphia—not to mention affiliates across the Midwest, South, West Indies, and even South Africa. Israelite ideas were popular in the Holiness movement, and played an indispensable role in the evolution of Pentecosalism, the most numerous Christian movement of the twentieth century. I could find important antecedents in the Anglo-Israelite, who had representatives both here and in Britiain, and even make a cameo in E.P. Thompso…
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…e numbers alone to bring folks in, they need to interact for like-minded causes. Electing a “Christian” is a like-minded cause, whether you believe in dominionism or not. A politician like Perry knows that he has to get these groups to coalesce together on his side in order to get votes and support. Whether Perry believes what they preach is up for debate, but it is clear that he is willing to use them to the fullest extent to gain the support he…
Read More…ilies, which resists the advance of LGBT equality worldwide. This week the Southern Poverty Law Center released its report on the WCF’s gathering in Tbilisi, Georgia last month, which it said showcased anti-LGBT rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Mexico: President promotes constitutional guarantee of LGBT equality; Mormon Church objects As Mexico’s complicated march toward nationwide marriage equality continues, President Enrique Peña Nieto wrote i…
Read More…l the early 2000s, it was rare for evangelicals to object to contraceptive use. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest organized evangelical group, accepted contraception use for married couples. Even the National Right to Life Committee took no official position on contraception. But as the culture wars heated up during the Bush administration, evangelicals were increasingly drawn to the hardline anti-contraception position of the Catholic…
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…r research, you need to have the term locked down. How does our day-to-day use of “spirituality” differ from the definition you use in the lab? Spirituality comes for many people within their religious tradition, and for many other people spirituality comes outside their religious tradition. There’s a very broad range of spiritual experiences. The piece that I focus on in The Spiritual Child is a direct relationship with a higher power, whether th…
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…Spirit guided his pronouncements. “The Church cannot change her answer because this answer is true because the Catholic Church, instituted by Christ could not have so wrongly erred during all those centuries of its history,” they wrote. As one of the conservative theologians famously asked one of the female members of the commission, what would happen to “the millions we have sent to hell” for using contraception if the teaching were suddenly chan…
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…of a norm violation. Consider “Why did he kick his friend in the shin?” We use the very same processes that we normally use to make sense of human behavior to now make sense of this violation of human behavior. Blaming is in a sense a socially grown mechanism to increase or decrease the degree of responding to violations, depending on (as research has shown consistently) whether the violations were intentional or not, whether they were based on ju…
Read More…ealth care reform who has said that health care reform is too important to use as a way to advance either pro-choice or prolife objectives—from Jim Wallis to Catholics United and everyone in between—speaks out immediately in opposition to this kind of immoral use of religious services. And every pro-choice Catholic needs to walk out of church when the lobby sermon begins. USCCB Nationwide Bulletin Insert Pulpit Announcements & Prayer Petition Inst…
Read More…ht use it for something else. If you give someone a gift card for a steakhouse, then if they use it, they will certainly use it for steak, because it’s designated to be used for steak. And if you have a moral problem with eating steak, then you shouldn’t be required by the government to pay your employees with a gift card for a steak house. Likewise employers shouldn’t be required by the government to pay their workers with a form of compensation…
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