Religion Dispatches
…ing up. The narrow stairway of our fifth story walk-up is pitch black. Our phones have no signal, which means no AP alerts, no Facebook, no Twitter—and no way to contact friends and family. Except for the radio, we’re cut off. And so is everyone else in the mass of humanity that lives and works below 39th Street. In the afternoon, after the worst of Sandy has departed for the north, I walk across Avenue B again into the Red zone. Some time during…
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…e convenience store with Skittles and a soft-drink and talking on his cell phone with his friend. Instead, all that Zimmerman could see was a hooded threat. And so, he deputized himself to be the police, and in that capacity shot Trayvon Martin dead. But more than just deputizing himself to act with police power (and this is the crucial point of Dr. Butler’s reflections), he deputized himself to stand in the place of god, to act in god’s name and…
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…nts Reform Judaism; Muslims and other non-Christian groups arrive in large numbers. But this is primarily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God…
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…Johnson, a fundamentalist megachurch pastor who had one of the biggest megaphones in Ohio in 2004. With his 2,000-member Fairfield Christian Church, Johnson ridiculed the early participants of We Believe Ohio, joking that their combined congregations could fit into a phone booth. Along with Rev. Rod Parsley—the movement’s bombastic mouthpiece who called on Ohio Christians (who he called the largest “interest group” in the state) to “lock and load”…
Read More…racy, and one of Freshwater’s most active supporters, told me in a January phone interview, “That is not the arm of Zachary Dennis, or if it is, it was not a mark left by John Freshwater.” When asked to clarify, Daubenmire at first denied he was accusing the Dennis family of lying. Then he accused them of being in it for money. Then he wanted to know if I was a Christian. In short, Freshwater and his supporters have done everything but accept pers…
Read More…e, it will lead to the killing of Christians in Africa. Speaking on an LBC phone in, Justin Welby said he had stood by a mass grave in Nigeria of 330 Christians who had been massacred by neighbours who had justified the atrocity by saying: “If we leave a Christian community here we will all be made to become homosexual and so we will kill all the Christians.” “I have stood by gravesides in Africa of a group of Christians who had been attacked beca…
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…me and rejection that comes when one of our own wanders or falls away. The phone calls stop, the texts cease, and the friendships end (scriptures such as Matthew 5:30; Matthew 18:15-17; and 1 Corinthians 5:1-13 are usually cited as reasons for “radical” acts of amputation). But how are we defining what is radical? Are we only radical when it comes to sexual sin? Are we radical in our love for the poor? Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testa…
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…. And so Thistlethwaite holds forth in “On Faith” but does not pick up the phone and call Peter. And Peter in turn rails against Wallis who in turn ignores everyone he does not think is more powerful than he (there I just did it; I was nasty). Thistlethwaite suggests that the differences are actually about strategy. Liberals demand complete agreement on all issues to work with others on one issue. Progressives want to reach out to moderates and ev…
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…courts for more than a decade. We used the internet to regroup and grow in numbers. The Church even developed its own web-based resources to acknowledge and address its own controversies—historic and contemporary. This, we thought, was a good sign. A sign that might not need to fear losing our membership, our place, in a cherished tradition, just for having and voicing questions, doubts, and differences. We told ourselves to not to be afraid. And…
Read More…entified himself as a Christian of a distinct stripe by advocating burning phone books that advertise abortion and then said he doesn’t have a Qur’an but if he did he would “feed it page by page to (his) goat who would be impervious to its lies.” He then admitted he’d not read the Qur’an because he “doesn’t read fiction.” Another who insisted he didn’t “hate other religions or cultures” then argued that the “so-called Christians” (referring to the…
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