Religion Dispatches
…e truth and reconciliation committee after the end of apartheid in South Africa. Eventually, she was asked to act as personal psychologist for a man known as “the butcher of apartheid.” In her book, she examined how the phenomenon of forgiveness worked. Now I have to confess, before I heard her speak and then subsequently read the book, I had a long discussion with a Jewish participant. We were not comfortable with our perception that the Christia…
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…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. #5 : Three Ways to American Beauty by Aaron K. Kerr At the height of secular modernity, when Catholics were openi…
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…ed on March 9 with a front-page story in USA Today. For the last week, his phone ringing off the hook, Kosmin has become a lightning-rod for anxiety about the decline of American religiosity. “Whoever doesn’t win the election is going to complain about voting fraud,” he says with a chuckle. In its first two days online, the ARIS’ 26-page summary report [pdf], authored by Kosmin and his Trinity College colleague Ariela Keysar, scored 40,000 downloa…
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…and tempers taking turns providing spiritual support, and mainly over the phone. Because Goodstein’s piece was essentially unsourced, some caution is in order as to even believing that Obama accepts rotating support and counsel from Jim Wallis, Joel Hunter, Otis Moss Jr., Kirbyjon Caldwell, and T.D. Jakes. This crew struck me as a little too Dream Teamy in respect to the political and cultural stances and demographic constituencies of the disting…
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…sts entered into full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a denomination that later allowed same-sex loving persons in ministry. Minerva grew up with a gay cousin who the family ostracized. She loved him. She searched the scriptures of her tradition to make sense of the situation. She concluded that just as farmworkers deserved justice, so did her cousin and, by extension, all LGBTIQ people. While the United Methodist Churc…
Read More…m as a “pervasive and aggressive movement” fueled by such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and others. These groups are attempting to “remove references to God and Jesus Christ” from American life. One particular concern for the Southern Baptist messengers is Christmas. The resolution “encourages believers to be aware of businesses, schools, and all other public institutions in their areas that are removing…
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…oment, I’m a little jealous of Benjamin Zeller’s new book Heavens Gate: America’s UFO Religion. During the Cold War, UFOs really were an important part of America’s religious imagination. You can see this in some of Lueken’s prophecies that account for UFOs. There have been several good books on UFO religions but I think there is a lot more to explore. I also admire Zeller for humanizing a group that the public has been very dismissive of. 10. Wha…
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Early Sunday morning I woke up, my phone abuzz with news. Reading about the shooting in Orlando, worry and fright overcame me. Still in a semi-wake, semi-sleep, semi-dream state, I thought it was Charleston all over again. Emanuel AME redux. My partner saw my face and asked what had happened. We turned on the television to learn that a man named Omar Mateen had entered a popular gay nightclub on its “Latin Night.” Using an AR-15 assault rifle and…
Read More…ans and 50 percent of the general population identified as “pro-life”; the number of Americans who identified as “pro-choice” hit a record low. But respondents’ opinions on policy issues around abortion had not drastically changed from previous years. Just over half of Americans think abortion should be “legal under certain” circumstances, only 2 percent more people than last year. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Americans (compared to 27 percent in 2011…
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…ntroversial. I don’t like being controversial. I get abused a lot in mail, phone calls and that sort of thing. I don’t enjoy that. But, if you are controversial in the public arena, the people who have given up on Christianity say, “My God, there must be something more to this story than I realized.” So, being controversial is my doorway to the generation of my own children. “The primary issue in the Christian church today is to get away from orig…
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