Religion Dispatches
…ne home Sarah Palin 1. Conference call with Smokey the Bear to map out guerrilla grizzly action plan 2. Primp for photo shoot with Today’s Christian Woman 3. Order camouflage Bible 4. Call Pat Robertson for spiritual guidance 5. Put hubbie on short leash 6. See if can find any prayer warriors willing to go all biblical on Levi 7. Send Rush a belated wedding gift Mel Gibson 1. *&^%^%$#@!!! 2. Mail in donation to Christians United for Israel 3. Prom…
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…68 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. (Licensed birth centers are intended for low-risk laboring women. They offer only three minor surgical procedures: episiotomy, laceration repair, and circumcision.) For all these reasons (the appearance of a double standard for abortion facilities; the speed with which the new regulations were handed down and compliance mandated; and the perception that the new regulations are intended to get around federal law), the…
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…licy, Rev. Carla Pratt Keyes, pastor of Ginter Park Presbyterian Church in Richmond, described an argument she heard during debate in the Presbytery of the James: This amendment is not about sexuality, it’s about methodology. [Fidelity and chastity] was put into the Book of Order to answer a question posed by the larger church—to settle things. But it hasn’t settled things at all. The new language is about trusting governing bodies to interpret th…
Read More…aith. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers-backed group that backed the election of Scott Walker and his anti-union agenda, co-founded the political consulting firm Century Strategies with Faith and Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed. Reed, who profits both from his evangelical cred (which apparently hasn’t faded, in spite of his questionable past) and his ability to put a…
Read More…far between. The New York Times builds its whole story out of a handful of phone calls and an email. But the article indicates that those who run the various nonprofits that help soldiers achieve conscientious objector status expect a floodgate of calls if Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is formally repealed. The good news is that the groups don’t think there is legal basis for the claims. In the “don’t ask, don’t tell” cases, Ms. McNeil concluded that there…
Read More…eracts with a local pastoral leader, he or she faces what some Mormons describe as “priesthood leader roulette.” Mormonism has a lay clergy, and the administration of the Church depends almost entirely on local volunteers who vary widely in their knowledge, experience base, and dispositions. For every local leader who acts out of love and inspiration, there is a local leader who sometimes acts out of a lack of knowledge, repulsion, or fear. Compou…
Read More…ghts on the anti-same-sex marriage campaign, Melanie felt compelled to contribute her own. During the 2000 Proposition 22 campaign in California, she had remained silent but feared that her silence signalled her consent. This time, after prayer, she felt directed to do it differently. So she sat down in a friend’s living room and held up for the camera a picture her three-year-old son had colored at nursery on Sunday bearing the caption: “I will l…
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…religious activism. I was there to meet a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Brian Merritt, the gregarious, affable pastor of the ecumenical, progressive Palisades Christian Church in the District. “I’ll be the guy in the Ben’s Chili Bowl hat,” Merritt told me on the phone. Merritt, 42, was inspired by the movement’s goals of confronting structural economic problems, a tack that he says has largely been ignored by progressive religious activism. As t…
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…mping with their children, too. I spent a little time under what the Rev. Brian Merritt calls the “mercy percolator,” a tree in McPherson Square where some ODC participants aim to have an interfaith service at around 12:30 each day. These were people seeking solace, communion, and yes, ritual: Merritt offered to anoint people “for wholeness,” with an equal sign on their foreheads, not a cross. He had several takers. Merritt told me that participa…
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…d, mistreated, left to die—the details may or may not come out. But considering how much harm and evil he caused, it is little surprise the nation celebrates his expiration. So why should it matter how he died? As vile as bin Laden and Qaddafi were, they should have been tried. Perhaps that was impossible. Perhaps we will never really know. And perhaps this is a moral conceit that is ultimately irrelevant—would postwar Europe have been very differ…
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