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Leaked Air Force Legal Opinion Approves Religious Expression

By Paul Rosenberg

…ers in practice never are.” Seidel cited a 2010 study finding a quarter of service members are nonreligious. “So, you’re talking about an audience full of nonreligious service members whose commanding officer is imposing religion on them in a way they can’t escape. That’s coercion,” he said. “It shouldn’t be happening.” MRFF plans a formal appeal “to the highest levels of the Department of Defense,” Weinstein said. “If we fail to receive timely an…

Pastor David Brooks, Your Sermons Are Growing Stale…

By Peter Laarman

…sed that you have established yourself as a beacon of insight, not only in service to our vast congregation but in service to an entire befuddled and dispirited nation that seems to have lost its way. We are proud that your new book deals explicitly with religious themes. You have been leaning in this direction for a long time, and we are glad to see you make your conviction that good religion is essential to good living ever more explicit. Your o…

Is Pope Francis Yogaphobic?

By Andrea R. Jain

…rom Northern Ireland, from co-opting and misconstruing Francis’ remarks in service to Colhoun’s own yogaphobic agenda. And Colhoun’s yogaphobia is a part of a much larger conservative movement. There have been many high-profile examples of evangelical yogaphobia (I have written about some of them here and here), but evangelicals are not the only players in the yogaphobic movement. Fr. Colhoun’s comments concerning yoga were not dissimilar from oth…

Call it ‘Christian Globalism’: A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation, Part III

By Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné

…ir multi-national, multi-racial and multi-ethnic character. That said, the numbers of nations and people that we mention are sourced solely on the claims of the groups themselves. We have no way to independently verify these numbers, so they should be used advisedly. Simply put, the global vision of the NAR is based on their understanding of the Great Commission text of Matthew 28:18-20, with an emphasis on “discipling nations” (28:19). Internatio…

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…ople to conceive of meaningful lives in God-free ways — as painters in the service of art, as scientists in the service of knowledge. For David Brooks, in other words, it feels amazingly great to live amidst the spoils of our secular age! But really, how does it feel to live in an age like ours, having moved from “the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people believe, others don’t and a l…

Is New Pope’s Take on the Poor All That New?

By Silvia Alves Fernandes and Manuel A. Vásquez

…articulation of the notion of the poor away from its moorings in the Latin American context, where it carried strong sociological and political connotations, toward a spiritualized and moralizing reading of poverty that resonates with the discontents generated by the on-going global economic crisis. While Latin American liberation theology is very diverse, in most versions of it the notion of the poor calls for a rigorous sociological and economic…

Pox Americana: Franzen’s Tragic Vision

By Peter Laarman

…y—are both undone by the shadowy and interlocking worlds of Big Energy and American imperial overreach in the Middle East. Walter leaves his good job with the Nature Conservancy to become a DC-based environmental shill for a Houston oil and gas player (and Bush family friend) named Vincent Haven (Franzen’s use of surnames is consistently arch in a way that Dickens would appreciate). With the help of his nubile young Indian-American assistant, Walt…

Healed of the Sin of Religion: At Church with Sara Miles

By Lisa Webster

…hey adore. And it’s funny, the desire of churches to make it into a social service program is so profound—like we have this idea that to be really professional you have to imitate the DMV or the post office, something like that. And in fact we’re not professional. Instead we get to participate in the gratuitous nature of creation, which is an amazing thing. And you try to organize it in a way that works well, which is what liturgy is. How do you e…

‘Manufactured’ Smear Campaign Attempts to Intimidate Church ‘Fasting From Whiteness’— It Didn’t Work

By Frederick Clarkson

…people of color in Chicago. The threats forced us to take our Palm Sunday service online, but honestly, inside the walls of the church this Lent has been absolutely amazing. Our notoriety came at the very end of Lent. For the first five Sundays what was front and center is the beautiful, joyful, amazing contributions to sacred music that have come from the global majority of Christians, which is people of color. The music has been as good as I ca…

Pope’s ‘Joy of Love’ Brings Little Joy To LGBT Catholics; Gay Atheist Malaysian Granted Refugee Status In Canada; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…vided for those who would like to do so. These prayers do not constitute a service of blessing.” Morgan told LGBT people that he knew they had been “persecuted and ostracized” by the chrch and said: “We deplore such hostility, and welcome and affirm the words of the Primates that condemn homophobic prejudice and violence. “We too commit ourselves to offering you the same loving service and pastoral care to which all humanity is entitled, and we co…