Religion Dispatches
…a donation but to make a “Passover offering.” Seven is a biblically significant number, the number of completion and perfection, and in this spring of 2007 the Praise-a-thon began on Easter Sunday, the seventh day of Passover. If you make the Passover offering, Munsey claims, God will give you seven blessings: God will dispatch an angel to lead miracles; rid you of your enemies; bless you with prosperity; heal you; give you longevity; give you an…
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…t formulizable and it is not about the checking off of belief boxes. These caricatures may be convenient for those who wish to see Christianity die, but they’re just not true. Christianity is a far more variegated thing than many atheists seem to understand. Finally, and parenthetically, it seems that we’re are a long way from showing that humans and other animals are “ultimately the same.” But, backing up a bit, I am not sure what these words eve…
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…yad’s family, she said, Madava was ready to hand her “a huge stack of American cash.” A year later, after she had enlisted the ACLJ’s help to rescue the Ayyad family, Bourland told me, “The Holy Spirit said, ‘ask Jordan to come with you to Zimbabwe.’” What followed was meetings with government officials from both Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change Party and Mugabe’s Zanu Party, and the formation of the African Centre…
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…of the jihadi image of violent social change. On the other hand, a significant number of failures of nonviolent resistence may lead to a violent backlash once again. Not all protests will end like Tunisia and Egypt. Others will be ruthlessly crushed, as was the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009. The current protests in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Libya face an uncertain end. Failure of nonviolent revolution has, in the past, been the occasion for r…
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…a sound bite. It’s difficult to have an inclusive conversation about it because it’s a theological conversation that not everyone relates to. In all of my struggles in life, regardless of sexuality, I really do think about what I do on a daily basis: in terms of the person I am, and how I relate to my friends and loved ones. I don’t ask if my sexuality is a fundamental divider between God and me, but what does it mean for me as an individual in c…
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…I the influence of the “protest vote” that pro-family and pro-marriage advocates called for in the country. After Peña Nieto announced he would promote a constitutional reform to recognize gay marriage throughout the country, as well as amendments to the Federal Civil Code to allow homosexual adoption, more than 1,000 organizations joined together to form the National Front for the Family (FNF). Heading up this front are the National Union of Pare…
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…story quotes a lesbian activist who says she has been receiving late-night phone calls for several weeks threatening to kill her if she does not close the advocacy group she works for. The campaign by “Islamic hardliners” has already forced an Islamic boarding school for transgender students to shut down. Indonesia’s human rights commission has deplored the outpouring of hatred, but President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has been silent. He was elected on…
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…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, killing…
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…reate a no-fly zone over the Nuba Mountains and the entire South Kordofan state to protect civilians from [our] own government’s air strikes? The international community must also intervene to open up full access for the humanitarian organizations to supply people with food, water, and medical care that will help marginalized people achieve freedom and peace. If the world stands idly by this time, then Khartoum’s troops and northern-aligned militi…
Read More…ristian schooling and Christian home schooling for which he laid philosophical, theological and legal foundations—Bachmann’s legal education is but one example of that. The influence plays out in the many Americans who see history and science as theology, promoting “Christian American history” and opposing evolution as an explanation for human origins. Granted Americans have always had a sense of themselves as what Ernest Lee Tuveson called A Re…
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