Deals 1 800-299-7264 Cheap Flights from Shanghai to San Francisco – United Airlines | Search Results | Religion Dispatches

‘Christian Warriors’: Who Are The Hutaree Militia And Where Did They Come From?

By Chip Berlet

…hristians and the evil forces of Satan predict actual future history. About 10-15 percent of our neighbors say they hope to see the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in their lifetime. The numbers vary over time and due to the ways questions are structured. It is clear, however, that more people are excited by this type of apocalyptic belief than can be explained by counting the actual parishoners sitting in the pews in fundamentalist churches. Most o…

Exclusion is Causing Great Harm: A Conversation With Suspended UMC Pastor Rev. Cynthia Meyer

By Joel Pitney

…. It’s just terrific. People probably wouldn’t expect that. It’s a very low-income, blue-collar, tiny rural town, but folks are not conservative around this kind of issue. They’re loving. They reach out to everybody. I think that’s true of a lot more “people in the pews” than some in the church want to recognize. The primary difficulty in this conference really has been the Bishop. While he claims to be more in the center, he’s quite conservative…

Unreleased Religious Freedom Manifesto Isn’t the Culture War Compromise It Hopes to Be

By Frederick Clarkson

…rnationally, with “the greatest single threat to religious freedo m in the United States”: same-sex marriage. Religious liberty, he suggests, is in danger of being “lost in America.” Other members of the drafting committee include: Os Guinness, an evangelical drafter of the Williamsburg Charter (an influential antecedent of the current project); Jacqueline Rivers, co-founder and executive director of the Witherspoon-sponsored Seymour Institute for…

The United Methodist Church to LGBTQ People: You’re ‘Sacred,’ But Not Welcome

By Pamela R. Lightsey

…ere efforts to show themselves to the world as “one body,” denominations can only make this claim in the spiritual sense. With the looming impasse on LGBTQ full inclusion into the life and ministry of the denomination, it may very well be that the United Methodist Church has reached the end of being “united.” If this is the case, shame on us, for we will repeat our own history of segregation, bigotry and schism and will put the final nail in the c…

‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

By Catherine Wessinger

…ution.” When Timothy McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma City Bombing on April 19, 1995, he was hoping to spark the Second American Revolution. Instead, people were shocked at the loss of 168 innocent lives in the bombing. As a result, the militias that had formed, especially after the aggressive handling of the Branch Davidian community by ATF and FBI agents in 1993, became quiet until Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Over the past few ye…

Predicting the Future of Religion: A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…olitic to spur revolutions in religion? Back to the Future Thanks to Pulp-O-Mizer for…er..finding…this book cover in a dusty archive. In the manner of our dear imaginary Court Demographer, let’s imagine what it might be like to look back, a hundred years from now, on religious change in the 21st century. A 22nd century historian might find herself describing how the United States, long known as an unusually pious nation (Chesterton’s country wit…

‘Spooky Action’ of Quantum Physics Offers an Alternative Frame for War in the Middle East and the 2024 Election

By Peter Schwartz

…pooky action at a distance.” Quantum entanglement evades the standard cause-and-effect model that’s so critical to classical physics, but it is about correlation. The phrase correlation is not causation generally refers to the problem of overdetermination—one thing may be connected to another but doesn’t necessarily occur because of the other. Correlation implies many causes for a single outcome, which makes it difficult to establish clear causal…

Ahmadinejad Aside, Anti-Racism Conference Was Deeply Flawed

By Austin Dacey

…South Africa, back in 2001 (which disintegrated into an anti-Semitic, anti-Western hate-fest that was abandoned by Israel and the United States). Representatives from dozens of nations streamed out of the hall in Geneva during Ahmadinejad’s speech calling Israel a “paragon of racism,” and railing against Zionist-controlled governments of the West. Still, I am determined to focus on the positive story: by imagining it. I am imagining that the proc…

Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews

By Shalom Goldman

…d rejection of violence through forgiveness. Gandhi’s Jewish Interlocutors, 1921-38 Of course much of the incivility of the current Gandhi flap can be understood in terms of the polarized nature of any conversation about Israel and the Palestinians. It is hard to imagine, in this overheated climate, how it is that the elder Gandhi and his Jewish conversation partners were able to conduct an actual dialogue about nationalism and religion over the c…

Citizens United’s Bad Religion

By Sarah Posner

…the Change,” which runs a little over an hour, is a standard rehash of anti-Obama-isms: he promised to unite the country, but stood with Skip Gates and Trayvon Martin. He promised to fix the economy, but he goes on vacation while your house is being foreclosed upon. He’s brought us socialism (health care reform), infringement of religious liberty (ditto), and, the film falsely suggests, was the mastermind of the financial industry bailouts that oc…