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Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a group of quintessentially American tinkerers grafted new practices of ‘spiritual mapping’ and ‘spiritual warfare’ onto a peculiar and radical theological substrate emerging from the Latter Rain and healing revivals that burst out in Canada and North America during the late 1940s. They molded their hybridized new Christianity into a standardized package of ideas and practices such that, by the late 1990…

The Atheist Encounter with Christianity: A Failure to Disbelieve?

By Paul Wallace

…s at once strong and flexible. In centuries past it has adapted itself thousands of times to thousands of different contexts. It has withstood challenges far more severe than evolution or the emboldened atheism of the 21st century. It will do so again. Christianity is Not Just about Jesus Dying for Our Sins A second excerpt is taken from further along in the comment, in a section that deals with questions of human uniqueness: Perhaps some religion…

It’s Not Raining Eligible Muslim Men

By Shabana Mir

…ws, but there the choices end. There is little by way of statistics for American Muslims as Muslims, so it is hard to tell whether there are just more Muslim women than men, whether there are fewer Muslim men because they may marry outside the faith (or because some men do marry abroad, traveling to their parents’ birthplaces to enter arranged marriages). But what we do know is that there are large numbers of single, bright, articulate, and profes…

A Matter of the Heart: Talking to Gay Christian Rocker Jennifer Knapp

By Kristin Rawls

…rts and shows, as well as contributing to these dialogues we’re having. My phone’s ringing off the hook, and I’m participating as much as I can in discussions with LGBT lay people and clergy. There are so many people who want to have a positive dialogue about this. I’m getting to the point that I feel like I can engage at a positive level and contribute to that conversation. So, did you follow the recent change in the Presbyterian Church-USA? Th…

Malawi Catholic Bishops Call For Enforcement of Sodomy Law; Ukrainian Thugs Disrupt Equality Festival Opposed by Orthodox Church; Indonesian Islamists Continue Rhetorical War on LGBTs; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ple are, according to a Wikipedia entry, “mixed-race descendants of West African, Central African, Island Carib, and Arawak people,” many of whom practice a syncretic form of Catholicism that incorporates some traditional mystical practices. According to 7Newsbelize, Stirm has said that he has “raised two Garifuna boys as (his) own” and that he has worked with others who “needed demonic strongholds broken off their lives from withcraft & fear.” Me…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…Jesus isn’t messiah material for religious Jews. So, at first glance, that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quick…

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

By Annika Brockschmidt

…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…etocentric worldview of monks. By restricting the monastic population to a number just large enough to run monasteries and to provide “costumed natives” for the tourist industry, Chinese government policymakers are privileging values like political stability, the physical preservation of monastic institutions as historical/cultural “relics,” and the tangible economic gains derived from treating these institutions as tourist venues. When they objec…

Christian Media Battle Over Controversial Figure

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…into question, along with affiliated ministries like Olivet University in San Francisco, the World Evangelical Alliance, and the Christian Post, a number of these affiliates went on the defensive. No response was more immediate, or more aggressive, than that of the Christian Post. Different Standards At Work The day after CT’s article was published online, the Post published a long piece titled, “Sources in ‘Second Coming Christ Controversy’ Face…

Risky Business: The Pitfalls at the Corner of Church & Wall Street

By Elizabeth Drescher

…pian “class warfare” fears of Tea Partiers and other Republicans? When the number of Americans living in poverty—46.2 million, according to a recent report from the Census Bureau—is at an all-time high? When more than 300,000 Christian churches dot the American landscape, the majority with declining membership and largely unused real estate or financial capital that might well be put to work in the service of that stalwart of Christian faith: neig…