Religion Dispatches
…a result of President Obama’s call to find common ground on the abortion issue, they held a two-day conference at Princeton University in which they sought to develop dialogue among those with different views. (You can read more about that here and here.) While the consistent-life-ethic prolifers have worked with the larger movement they’ve always pushed for the strategy of reducing abortions by trying to find common ground. They’ve also argued t…
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…e Exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary, criticized Gothard’s “chain-of-command” tenets of patriarchy in an essay: Paramount among these is the terrible picture of the chain of command in the family with the husband as the hammer, the wife as the chisel and the children as the gems in the rough… The ghastly picture is that he beats on her and she chips on them. If ever there were a reason for a women’s movement in the evangelical church—this i…
Read More…ens. The compassionate instincts of this country should not be silent in the face of injustices like China’s One-Child policy. No one will ever hear a President Romney or his vice president tell the Chinese government that “I fully understand” and won’t “second-guess” compulsory sterilization and forced abortion. Americans have a moral duty to uphold the sanctity of life and protect the weakest, most vulnerable, and most innocent among us. As pres…
Read More…alone, he does effectively call attention to the implications of a now all-too familiar theo-financial formula. Before you check out the video for yourself on YouTube, here’s a random sample of the song’s lyrics: … For the low low price, you too can live the glamorous life, you too can have the blood of Christ, three easy payments, order tonight… … I know I’m spiritual I need a financial miracle Please God, you’re the king imperial And I’ll take…
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…hite and Fable, which directly encourage such a perspective taking a tongue-in-cheek jab at traditional religion. In The Bible Online these issues are somewhat more confused, complicated by your dual identity as God (through control of wealth and resources) and as his patriarchs (through specific role-play). Perhaps, though, we’ll find that players’ ability to control resources is thwarted by divine intervention within the game’s algorithms. Perha…
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…that with a fuller understanding of speech and meaning, which takes speech-qua-speech acts into consideration, we see much reason on the side of those who advocate the deplatforming of white supremacist speech and speakers. On the side of some free speech absolutists, meanwhile, lies a quite fanciful and underthought understanding of no less than how language and meaning work. I’m not suggesting for a moment that, by thinking in terms of speech a…
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…cking the victims of the Holocaust, which Aiwanger supposedly wrote as a 17-year-old student, surfaced, and was corroborated by “around two dozen people” who’d been classmates at the time. Then, former classmates reported that back when he was a student the Bavarian deputy premier liked to give the Hitler salute and to spend his time rehearsing Hitler speeches in front of the mirror. Aiwanger claimed, despite the numerous testimonies of classmates…
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…African Americans. This is compounded by the failure of American democracy to deliver on its promises of an inclusive society with equality before the law. As long as other Black religious traditions fail to offer answers to questions of Black suffering, small but significant numbers of Black people will seek refuge in beliefs that offer an alternate theological explanation for the crisis of Black life in America….
Read More…e members taking up the suggestion of a group that has promoted Obama-might-be-the-Antichrist conspiracy theories. In the 2010 video, Levesque noted that “God has given us a purposeful ambiguity around” the Antichrist, yet proceeded to offer what he apparently believes is evidence that Obama might be it — or at least anti-Christian, or Antichrist-ish. Levesque claimed Obama “twist[s] the word of God” and “the Antichrist Quotient goes up above and…
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…f his retirement savings, well over a half-million dollars, taking out full-page newspaper ads and buying an RV that he had custom-painted with doomsday warnings. Even when I pressed, he wasn’t willing to admit any doubts about whether October 21 would really, finally, be it. “How can you say that when you see that all this beautiful information is in the Bible?” he asked me, his voice rising. “How can everything we’ve learned be a lie?” “I Was Pa…
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