Religion Dispatches
…ld say to the people of America: Do you think I’m a pathological liar like CNN does? Or do you think I’m an honest person?” Carson said. Translation: I’m honest! I really did try to kill my friend. Or relative. Or something. The West Point story, though, is different. While the story about his temper and violence played well into the redemptive narrative of Gifted Hands, and Carson’s reliance on God to deliver him from his terrible behavior, makin…
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…New movie with gay love story draws controversy for including Xhosa ritual CNN reports on the “critically lauded but publicly divisive” film “The Wound.” The film by director John Trengove is a love story between two Xhosa men set against “ulwaluko,” the Xhosa coming-of-age circumcision ritual. The film’s star, Nakhane Toure, has reportedly been receiving “homophobic abuse” amid boycott calls. From CNN: The furore threatens to cloud a gripping stu…
Read MoreCNN’s Belief Blog has a great rundown of the lavish homes of American archbishops who haven’t gotten the memo from Pope Francis about a “church which is poor and for the poor.” CNN reports that “10 of the 34 active archbishops in the United States live in buildings worth more than $1 million.” The median home value in the U.S. is $174,200. Not surprisingly, that list includes some of the nation’s most outspoken conservative bishops—and allies of…
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…o be, overwhelmingly Christian. I confess that I have been fairly glued to CNN in the past twenty-four hours, and two things have struck me as I watched the constant onslaught of images of suffering and destruction. The first is the erroneous fact that CNN keeps claiming on its ticker that Haiti is 80% Roman Catholic. The second is the sheer amount of US missionaries on the island. The two are interrelated. Recent studies estimate that the Protest…
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…s Belief Blog: “Can You Believe in Both Bigfoot and the Bible?” Apparently CNN’s people—its authors and most of the people who have commented on its article thus far—have not been not been channel-surfing enough. At least not in Tennessee. Just two weeks ago, on October 1, 2010, Hal Lindsey (author of the grand-daddy of all Left Behind books, The Late Great Planet Earth), devoted his television show to this very question: “Are UFOs Real?” If you m…
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…eded the announcement of breaking news, and hearing Wolf Blitzer say, “And CNN can now project that Barack Obama, 47 years old, will become the President-Elect of the United States…” I read on the screen “Barack Obama Elected President” and felt the pandemonium of celebration around me. The palpable energy that had until that moment felt like an undercurrent became a gushing waterfall, some of which seemed to be making its way through to my phone….
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…married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…
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No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…
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…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…
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…unaffiliated with any faith, up 10 percentage points since 2007.” But what CNN really meant was “When asked by a complete stranger, over the phone, to define their spiritual lives in a single phrase, one-third of those adults who responded to this poll (response rate: one in ten), and who fall within an arbitrarily-defined generational frame, declined to tell the aforementioned complete stranger that they were affiliated with any specific religiou…
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