Religion Dispatches
…us from seeing potential for shared values. Instead, extremists presume conflict, and lead us to assume conflict, because they portray Muslims and the West as homogenous and oppositional identities. Each side is pushed by opportunists and radicals to see the other as dangerous and threatening. To Each His Other From the perspective of the average American, to whom the Muslim world might be at best a hazy mystery, there is a free and democratic Wes…
Read More…practices—languages of theology, ethics, or Biblical interpretation and practices of formation, compassion, or social justice—have some capacity to begin to create those other meanings of value; forging connections between the value-laden meanings of “Be faithful” and the value-laden meanings of “Condoms” would be a good place to start….
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…evangelicals overall (24 percent to 10 percent), and a majority of young evangelicals support either marriage or civil unions.” The numbers remain in line with other recent polls, like one commissioned by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)—and I’ll admit my friend Debra Haffner has every right to be encouraged by these statistics—but I can’t get over my anger that my life even has to be the subject of constant polling. Why do…
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…on by faith” in this scenario does not constitute a critique of Torah observance in general. Rather it is a critique of Gentile observance of Torah in particular. In no way does Paul condemn Judaism, and he certainly does not construct Judaism and Christianity as antithetical religions. His letters were written to a Gentile audience, and if there is any condemnation of religious practice to be found in the apostle’s writings, it is the idolatry of…
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…ys Mark was the first Internet age megachurch celebrity pastor and leading number one podcasts, number one sermon downloads, those kinds of things. So what that did is, elevated Mark to the stratosphere so quickly, whereas you might think…typically they may take 20-30 years of faithful ministry, but the Internet just propelled things with such rapidity, and the Internet only sees how you speak, that’s all the Internet is, it’s all about verbal art…
Read More…umber three, it’s presence is still felt in just about all aspects of the “value voters” belief system. With abortion remaining at the number one spot, it’s clear that all things sexual continue to occupy the minds of those who seem the most opposed to anyone actually having sex. It’s interesting to view the “value voter” summit in juxtaposition with a new survey conducted by the Des Moines Register. In a surprising move last April, the Iowa Supre…
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…husiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the official religion, but that government should pro…
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…erything he did private and public exuded that light. It would have been devastating, I think, for him to profess to faith in the public, but then do horrendous ungodly things in private. I adored my father. I also had my first experience of transcendence sitting with him. I was deathly afraid of thunderstorms when I was little. I used to think there was a special message for me from an angry God. Oddly enough it wasn’t the lightening, which could…
Read More…Christ of Latter-day Saints, it’s pretty safe to assume that a significant number of “Concerned Citizens of the United States” are Mormon. But so too are a significant number of undocumented immigrants living in the American West. As we’ve reported here at RD, the Church’s strongest growth over the last decade has been among Latino populations, and almost 4.5 million Mormons worldwide are Spanish-speaking. Economic downtimes and anti-immigrant out…
Read More…T community in America. Two-thirds of the 36 benchmarks show significant advances, including sharp increases in the number of LGBT Americans protected by nondiscrimination and family recognition legislation at the state level. Less than one quarter of the indicators are negative, and four metrics show little change (either positive or negative). The report shows that an increasing number of people believe homosexuality to be morally acceptable (49…
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