Religion Dispatches
Alabama Governor Robert Bentley ordered the removal of four Confederate flags from the state capital grounds today, part of a remarkably rapid trend of banishing the flag from places where it might embarrass Republicans. But that will hardly make it, or the people who continue to revere it and what it represents, disappear. In the wake of Charleston, and the exposure of Dylann Roof’s white supremacist views, we are seeing reports of associations…
Read MoreMexico: Catholic bishops perform anti-marriage-equality exorcism At conservative journal First Things, intern Matthew Young contrasts the “weak” opposition from Irish church leaders to the marriage equality referendum with more robust statements from church officials in Mexico, where the courts are in the process of making marriage equality a reality nationwide: Statements from church officials in Mexico are markedly different than those from the…
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She’s got everything delightful, she’s got everything I need, A breeze in the pines and the sun and bright moonlight, lazing in the sunshine yes indeed. ~ “Sugar Magnolia” My childhood home was equidistant between two of the Grateful Dead’s regular Bay Area venues: Berkeley’s Greek Theater and Oakland’s Kaiser Convention Center. When the Deadheads came to Berkeley, they camped in the parking lot behind my high school, and when they came to Oaklan…
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That crashing sound you heard Monday morning was waves of change breaching the levees of the evangelical Christian world when one of its most venerable icons, the Rev. Tony Campolo, came out in favor of full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the life of the church. While his name may not be as familiar outside the evangelical bubble as his contemporary, the Rev. Billy Graham, Campolo, 80, is undeniably a pillar of the evangelical world and has been fo…
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Editor’s Note: Among the trends that bear watching throughout America’s evolving Christian landscapes is a holistic rethinking of physical church space—how to design, build, and share it in equitable, environmentally just, and creative ways that foster community (inside and out of the faith community.) Along with church campuses that are “green” and equipped to handle the various spiritual and cultural needs of millennials (aka “digital natives”)…
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If religious kitsch is a guilty pleasure, one of my favorite indulgences is a graphic that depicts a school of ichthus—the simple outline of a fish that is was an early symbol for followers of Christ—with a contemporary “evangellyfish” swimming in the opposite direction. The caption reads, simply, “Go against the flow.” The 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study, which is being rolled out in a series of reports this year, depicts a deep shift in how…
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If any game has more potential to offend than Cards Against Humanity, A Game for Good Christians just might be it. Inspired by the R-rated “party game for horrible people” in which players pair cards like “Hospice care,” “An endless stream of diarrhea,” or “A defective condom” with fill-in-the-blank statements like “I got 99 problems but ________ ain’t one,” A Game for Good Christians, released earlier this year, offers a scriptural twist: most o…
Read MoreAt Vox.com, Dylan Matthews argues (with charts) that the retention rate among people raised with no religion is much lower than among people raised with religion — in other words, that people raised with no religion as children are more likely than people raised with religion to change their religion as adults, in this case, to become religious. “Do kids raised without religion actively seek it out and convert all that often,” as has been popular…
Read MoreMy favorite new website is All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay. It’s a simple game: enter the name of a dead Mormon, or the site will choose one for you, and with the click of a mouse, the deceased LDS member is instantly converted to homosexuality. Of course, this makes no sense, and is somewhat offensive. But then, so are the views of some (though not all) Mormons that the dead can be posthumously baptized – or at least given the offer of baptism (whi…
Read MoreA 2008 hidden-camera video of a perturbed Mitt Romney discussing Mormonism with an ultra-conservative Iowa talk radio host named Jan Mickelson started making the rounds again late last week, and now, according to Politico.com, it has gone “viral.” Prickly and irritated, Romney pushes back when Mickelson challenges him on his view of the end-times and whether Jesus Christ will reign from Jerusalem or a New Jerusalem in the Americas. “I understand…
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