Religion Dispatches
…Participants returned to a local park to listen to Conference on their cellphones—the first time in history that Church officials permitted broad media access to the event, a move some have characterized as a concession to ticket requests from Ordain Women leaders. Inside the Tabernacle and the nearby Conference Center, rows of seats went unfilled. Saturday’s Ordain Women action has initiated an unprecedented conversation about power, leadership,…
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…e for president and only the second Roman Catholic to run on a major-party ticket. Graham assured Kennedy in no uncertain terms that, contrary to rumors, the evangelist had no intention of raising the “religious issue” during the course of the campaign. Eight days later, however, Graham convened a gathering of American Protestant ministers in Montreaux, Switzerland, to discuss how to derail Kennedy’s campaign. The follow-up to the Montreaux meetin…
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…of church growth that focused on homogeneous congregations and a personal ticket to heaven was quietly forming deep habits of selfishness in a racist society. It was 1976, and Hilliard wasn’t critiquing the Christian Right, because it didn’t exist. He was warning about what white evangelicals were learning in their own churches. Ignoring critics like Hilliard, the “Church Growth Movement” took the white evangelical world by storm and aided the ri…
Read More…of protest is to wear the niqab and nothing else. Then, the women will get tickets, not for being nude, but for being clothed. In my opinion, that would show the absolute absurdity of the state trying to control women’s dress. I have written elsewhere that this sort of action, of controlling a woman’s body, is simply male penis worship run amok. These ladies, who call themselves Niqabitches, have done a great service in showing the inherent contra…
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…and the church insisted that Catholics opposed the decision, a significant number of Catholics similarly ignored them, having decided that on matters of sexuality the hierarchy wasn’t to be trusted? It’s that split within Catholicism that freed up Catholics to affiliate with whatever political party best met their priorities: social justice issues for left-leaning Catholics and sexual restraint, law-and-order, and a muscular national defense for r…
Read More…e shoulder. Recognized and then cheerfully interrogated by fellow protestors, Huntsman melted into the crowd. Both Huntsman and Romney remind me of the premium Mormon culture has placed on clean-cut all-American likeability. Since the middle of the twentieth-century, that’s been the ticket we’ve tried to ride away from our frontier origins and melt into the suburban middle class. And still, Mormons consistently find our faith ranking consistently…
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…oke through and gained control of the presidency and Congress and passed a number of historic bills, including the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which reintroduced silver into the currency supply, and the McKinley Tariff Act, the Republican attempt to modernize the tariff schedule. They also passed a long-awaited pension for Civil War veterans and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Democrats dubbed the 51st Congress the “Billion Dollar Congress,” char…
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…the creation of a more just church and society was worth the price of the ticket. Yet two of the more interesting interventions came from Jack Fitzmier, Executive Director of the American Academy of Religion, and Tony Jones, an independent author, blogger and emerging church entrepreneur. Fitzmier challenged our very raison d’etre as academic theologians. In an era marked by faltering seminaries and divinity schools, limited graduate programs in…
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…choice, a result of overbearing mothers and distant fathers, and a one-way ticket to hell. “I won’t risk our family not being together in the next life,” she declares. “I’m healed!” The film hews to the conventions of Lifetime, in which tragedy inevitably leads to personal growth. There are archetypal characters: the jock brother who makes gay jokes, the sinister psychiatrist, the judgmental minister from the Griffith’s church, and the sympathetic…
Read More…d yet one more indication that the “base” is shifting and the McCain-Palin ticket is wobbling in the shockwaves of that seismic event. What Powell said to Tom Brokaw was telling, most of all for his quiet composure and lack of animus. What was very clear, however, was that this career military man is completely dismayed by what the Republican establishment has permitted his party to become. Race-baiting and religion-baiting are of a piece in Powel…
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