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Eclipseville, USA: The Birthplace of ‘Little Green Men’ Proudly Hosts The Point of Greatest Eclipse

By Matthew Bowman

…nge direction and odd shadows will flicker across beaches. Annie Dillard describes how colors become wrong and landscapes devastated. It is not terribly surprising that ancient Americans offered human sacrifice to save the sun as the sky darkened, nor that medieval Catholics flocked to confession when an eclipse approached—and nor even that, as Reilly describes, a small band of eclipse-chasers even today spend their lives pursuing the weird rush o…

Religion or Insanity? Two Upcoming Murder Trials Will Ask the (Burning) Question

By Joseph Laycock

…An essay on the afterlife contains no mention of other galaxies but does describe hell as a “safe place.” Satanists, it claims, will be escorted to hell by protector demons and treated as “VIPs.” This may have been an appealing idea to Dobson, who claims he attempted suicide to escape demons that were tormenting him nightly. However, “Joy of Satan” discourages suicide, warning, “The Powers of Hell want us to live. The enemy tries to get people to…

I Owe, Therefore I Am: Why Struggling Against the Banks is a Holy Obligation

By Peter Laarman

…that had been in place so long that “no one ever mentioned it to us at law school” (Geoghegan). What began to ensue after longstanding statewide limits on interest rates got invalidated was entirely predictable: “When banks get 25-30 percent on credit cards, and 500 percent or more on payday loans, capital flees honest pursuits.” And did capital ever flee, according to Geoghegan’s great tale of cupidity unbound. He describes what happened, accurat…

Gay Suicide and the Ethic of Love: A Progressive Christian Response

By Eric Reitan

…fight. If someone had pressed into his fingers at that pivotal moment the phone number for The Trevor Project, he might reach out and hear a voice of reassurance, a voice that gave him hope for life by, in part, repudiating the so-called biblical teaching that who he is amounts to an offense against God. If he’d had a sense of belonging to a community that embraced him for who he is, maybe his hope wouldn’t be so fully shattered. But while other…

Missouri Pastor Goes Viral on Gawker: ‘Separation of Church and Hate’

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…us some of the time and some of us all of the time. I draw heavily on the scholarship of John Caputo who, as I mentioned above, is one of my theological heroes. The Hyphenateds is a collection of essays I edited related to the changing landscape of ministry in postmodern contexts. It features essays by some of my favorite progressive church leaders, including Nadia Bolz-Weber, Carol Howard Merritt, Stephanie Spellers, and several others. Toward a…

Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an Atheist

By Lauri Lebo

…ou need to know to keep on reading? I’d cheerfully watch that man read the phone book. So, when my buddy Rev. El Mundo sent me the link to the comedian’s message, I eagerly clicked on it. I was surprised when I saw this wasn’t a clip of his latest hysterical stand up, but an essay he penned for the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. The topic of his essay was how he came to be an atheist. The whole piece is here. While there is humor in the pie…

A Valentine for the World…and for the Church I Left

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…ing after me? I’m the one who left and would go on to write a memoir and a screenplay in which the character based on me is the winsome, adorable star while the characters based on you are crazy-zealous and sometimes close-minded and self-satisfied. A description, you have to admit, that could apply to all of us in the old days. We had the truth, the only truth, and to hell (literally) with everyone else. We were twenty, and I forgive us. Twenty-y…

Why is Liberty Institute Still Defending Phillip Monk?

By Rob Shryock

…ying, “We’ve gotten phone calls from military members who are undergoing discrimination…and with the exception of him, those folks that have called us have all wanted to remain anonymous. Sergeant Monk, to his credit, is willing to stand up.” Let’s read between the lines here: Monk is, quite literally, the best example of discrimination against Christians in the military that the Liberty Institute could find. He was chosen not so much because his…

Facebook, Twitter, and the Death of Body Language

By Anthony B. Pinn

…TREO, and I’m not canceling the media package on my phone or reducing the number of messages I sent through that magical device. I am not calling for a technology purge. I’m simply noting that technology comes with a price, and this price has something of a postmodern twist. By this I mean that tweeting and other high-tech modalities of exchange send information about happenings, attitudes, feelings, and events—but in a way that disconnects life…

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…into heaven he sends a double portion of his human spirit onto his human disciple. When Jesus ascends into heaven he sends the infinite power of God’s holy spirit on the whole gathered community sufficient to last through all of time. You’ve got to see the connections between these stories before they make sense. It gives you an alternative to biblical fundamentalism. That’s not original to the text. We imposed fundamentalism on the Bible. No one…