Religion Dispatches
…odox Muslims. 3. Moro Islamic Liberation front and Phillippine government Sign Peace Accord regarding the four-decade conflict, which has cost over 150,000 lives. 4. Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Al-Nahda in Tunisia Claim Victories in post-Arab Spring elections to establish new governments and constitutions. 5. Bahrain Continues to Crack Down on Dissent and peaceful protests, violate human rights, and issue extreme sentences on detainees. 6. Ri…
Read More…other’s Day to launch its new campaign to invite one million believers to ‘sign up’ for full LGBT equality in our churches and society-at-large.” The reaction from progressive Christians was swift and deafening. “The big tent collapsed this weekend,” wrote Episcopalian and LGBT equality activist Jim Naughton, “and it was Sojourners who yanked out the tent poles. Someone needs to alert official Washington that Jim Wallis and his minions no longer s…
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…stry on the part of traditional religious leaders, it nonetheless seems to signal the enduring, if redefined, significance of at least the concept of prayer: the idea of a reaching out, however momentarily, however noncommittally, to an imagined digital cosmos and whatever greater power makes it hum for a blip of connection and solace. Perhaps, in aggregate, that spiritualized pause in the noosphere is not nothing, mere microblinks of expression c…
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…ular liberals. Instead, they should have done everything in their power to promote North Carolina’s Freedom of Religion Act and, more, fought to establish the Christian state of North Carolina as quickly as possible. And conservative evangelical legislators need not waste their time writing toothless resolutions establishing state religions. Rather, if the Christian Right would like religion to prosper in America, they should erect a wall between…
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…ism, since the goal is to come up with the most robust examination of the “signs of the times.” This analysis is a necessary, feet-on-the-ground precondition for deep reflection in the light of Christian resources in a see-judge-act spiral that led to faith-informed actions to address injustices, even if through small grassroots practices. By contrast, Francis seems to think of poverty primarily as a virtue, as a marker of service, frugality, hone…
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…tionships between Messianic Jews and more conventional Semites. “This is a sign of growing inclusivity and a growing acceptance, in some Jewish quarters, of Messianic Jews.” Could that growing inclusivity be the end of American Jewry? Last time I checked, Jews weren’t defecting to Christianity en masse. And, as J.J. Goldberg points out over at the Forward, the Pew survey indicates that America’s Jewish population is growing. So what does this all…
Read More…the Affordable Care Act. Rep. Darrel Issa said that the hymn singing was a sign of the caucus’s solidarity in standing up to what Rep. Tim Huelskamp derisively called “the Senate Surrender Caucus.” That opposition to compromise was also a theme of the Christian conservatives who gathered in Washington over the weekend for the Values Voter Summit, the annual political conference sponsored by the Family Research Council, the American Family Associat…
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…e violence, as if all we need to understand the one is the other. One sure sign of an Islamophobe is this: you need only remove a few words here and there and their argument pertains with equal vehemence to the West, or Christianity, or Europe. ‘All Muslims are x,’ they say, ‘because some Muslims do x.’ Surely the stuff Western civilization was built off of. V. One Of Us is Rubber and The Other is Glue Many Islamophobes desperately want to be enga…
Read More…te anti-gay messages. Childers said that he was once one of the people who promoted anti-gay messages. “I am thankful that I was allowed to be liberated from that prejudice,” he said. He urged pastors who are asked to partner with the organizations attending the Values Voter Summit not to “make a mockery of their faith” by embracing the harm those groups cause. NALT co-founders John and Catherine Shore spoke about leaving their first church home w…
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…by Eucharist—is this interview simply a puff piece, a case of the Jesuits promoting their own and their own promoting Jesuits? Is it meant as a way to attract people back to a church that may have a kinder face but just as steely a heart? Is the good will it has engendered trustworthy? The Roman Catholic Church has been around for several thousand years for a reason. I hope this interview is a beginning not an end of a new moment. These serious…
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