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Black Episcopal Congregation Celebrates Lesbian Marriage

By Rev. Irene Monroe

…e than one way to look at each one of those verses. If we believe that the Spirit continues to guide the church in the interpretation of scripture, as was done with respect to slavery and the status of women, then we have to consider the possibility that the Spirit is speaking today, as the hearts and minds of so many people at so many levels of Bible scholarship no longer read those verses as a blanket condemnation of same-sex relationships, or a…

Rethinking Religion After Latest Holistic Death

By Joseph Laycock

…ss,” as conceived by holistic health practitioners, involves the mind, the spirit, and the body. However, North Americans frequently continue to think about “religion” in Cartesian terms as a phenomenon of the mind and spirit rather than the body. This view assumes that medicine should be closely regulated, but that religion should be a thoroughly private matter. These imperfect categories make it difficult to decide when therapists should be lice…

Loving Uganda to Death: The Global Reach of Far-Right Christian Hatred

By Peter Montgomery

…wing same-sex couples to get married would unleash “sexual insanity” and a spirit “more demonic than Islam.” Williams does not delve deeply into IHOP’s dominionist worldview, but IHOP officials tell him about the ambitious goals they have for their 1,000-person staff: a vision of one million new Christian soldiers who will win one billion souls—and raising one trillion dollars to make it happen. They tell young followers, “You’re going to take ove…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…percent of all adults.” (Emphasis added.) Does this mean that Nones eschew spiritual community? My own research for a forthcoming book on the spiritual lives of Religious Nones suggests otherwise. Though my research is very preliminary at this stage, the desire for community in which religious or spiritual concerns can be shared consistently emerges from interviews with self-identified Nones. That doesn’t, however, mean they’re looking for a commu…

Election Day: Hope, Heartbreak, Naiveté, and Studs Terkel

By The Editors

…year as never before. Today Americans are voting. May all be guided by the spirit of love and wisdom in our choices. And when the polls close, may the spirit of love and wisdom continue to prevail in our reactions to the outcome—no matter who wins. In elections there are winners and losers, but we all lose if the winners fail to reach out to their fellow citizens who voted in the minority. May we move forward together. In your many names we pray….

The Many, Not the Few: An Anthem for Occupy

By Elizabeth Drescher

…nce between his stage and that of the protesters, but Makana sees the same spirit of aloha—a spirituality lost, like so many Hawai’ian protest songs, on many outsiders—as animating even angry dissent with love: It takes great courage and self-sacrifice to protest something that you feel is unjust and is causing harm to people… All I can do is look at what’s going on and envision in my heart that people come from a place of love and kindness—all pe…

Jesus Has Left the Building: Celebrating the Next Reformation

By Donna Schaper

…eran or Presbyterian was. Now most people who still believe with a gracing Spirit don’t really care what they are in the first place. That applies unless you are the type of conservative Christian who has a theology of blame and shame or what I call “punishmentalism.” Then you still want to “get it right.” The mainlines are the old lines, and the evangelicals’ dogmatism will soon be there as well. Gratia always escapes religious tendrils and chain…

Sex, the Body, the World: It’s R. Crumb’s Bible Now

By Naomi Seidman

…ritual universe, in which the single word ru’akh means wind AND breath AND spirit, has been lost in the spiritualizing afterlife of the Bible. Crumb’s illustrations do not merely restore the physical dimension suppressed by theologizing abstraction, at their best they convey that there are no differences between these realms, as there is none between—in one of the more charged corollaries of the distinction between Earth and spirit—sex and love. M…

Resisting the “New Normal” of Parasitic Capitalism in the Two Americas: The Religious Imperative

By Peter Laarman

…this prophetic mold. Let me end this by saying that I am not holding my breath. I do not expect a radical religious voice to suddenly emerge in this way. The signs of near-complete religious domestication are everywhere. Yet I also believe that the Holy Spirit can descend at even the most unexpected times. And if even a small fraction of US religious leaders were to catch this particular spirit, I have no doubt that all kinds of holy hell would b…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…t has faced threats of her own. In January, one local group of protesters, Spirit One Christian Ministry (previously in the news for protesting the establishment of Wichita’s only Islamic center, and for planning a full-sized replica of the Wailing Wall as a memorial to the “abortion Holocaust”) held what they euphemistically call a “neighborhood visit” to Burkhart’s home. They protested outside her house with graphic signs and walked door to door…