Religion Dispatches
On the campaign trail this past summer in Zanesville, Ohio, President Obama committed his administration to extending the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships while maintaining the appropriate boundaries between church and state. Part of this boundary, he then asserted, involved undoing President Bush’s policy that allowed religious organizations funded by the federal government to discriminate in hiring. President Obama w…
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…at it. The photo of the creepy abandoned church was one I snapped with my iPhone while on a trip to southern Ohio. I didn’t intend to use it for the book; I just thought it was a great picture. But as I considered cover ideas, that image of a decaying church perfectly embodied what I was trying to say in the book. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? How do you even narrow down a question like this? Fiction? Non-fiction? Historical?…
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…west Dubois County Schools in Indiana and Federal Hocking Local Schools in Ohio, explained that they had never blocked TST’s website and that the task of determining which web content students can access is outsourced to a company called Lightspeed Systems, headquartered in Austin, Texas. Someone at Lightspeed Systems had manually tagged TST’s website as “mature,” meaning students could not access it from schools. “There is no mature content on ou…
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…n August 1984, the bishops’ conference, then led by Bishop James Malone of Ohio, released a statement aimed at Ferraro and other public dissenters, including Mario Cuomo, though they didn’t refer to any politicians by name. The bishops claimed they needed to correct what they saw as an impossible, fallible stance, that “this implied dichotomy—between personal morality and public policy—is simply not logically tenable.” The real trouble with Cathol…
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…while money is desperately needed in key swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. This is part of a long-term trend towards turning Colorado purple, and increasingly blue. So it’s not entirely clear why he’s coming at all. But if he is, rousing the base in El Paso County certainly makes political sense, even if a rising Latino vote is likely to derail his train pretty badly. In response to Trump’s visit, a group of faculty members here began drafti…
Read More…ll down 61% of the vote, but yikes. If you’re a Republican, that’s a scary number. You might reasonably intuit Trump’s miserable numbers with Catholic voters are the result of his poor showing with Hispanic voters, or stem from his “virulent” immigration policy. Certainly, getting scolded by Pope Francis or the likes of Cardinal Dolan (himself no left-winger) doesn’t help. But in fact, it’s white Catholics who have turned against Trump. He’s reall…
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…tched around several city blocks, districts that were used to double-digit numbers were overwhelmed with thousands of participants, and the vast majority were adamant Sanders supporters. The night was unprecedented in the modern Mormon world. https://twitter.com/sltrib/status/710953531021221888 Close observers expected the “Mormon Vote” to go Sanders’s way—the latest polling had him up eight points, Sanders held huge rallies in both states, and Hi…
Read More…ongwood, Florida; and Pastor Rich Nathan of Vineyard Columbus in Columbus, Ohio. They all discussed the biblical and moral imperative to welcome the stranger; Nathan noted how the push for immigration reform “has united the religious community, even for those of us who consider ourselves conservatives.” Many of those conservatives, though, support immigration reform, but not for gay and lesbian people. The Democratic Party was criticized after the…
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…lence. Reverend Karl Jones from the Fellowship Church of God in Cleveland, Ohio, summarized this militant God when he said, “Some people say, well, ‘God is only a god of love,’ [but] no, God was a god of war. God is a god of vengeance. Very few people like to talk about God in his totality. God took judgment, several times…[T]he god that I serve was a god of wrath, vengeance, protection; watching out for his own.” This god demands justice and is w…
Read More…ork on scripture memory? There’s an app for that. You can even use your iPhone to tweet the latest execution news, like the Utah Attorney General. But for others the internet is a place for anti-religious rage. Over at the Huffington Post, they have debuted a new discussion between religion and science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science continues to seek dialogue between science and religion. University of Colorado psyc…
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