Search for "VIPREG2024 1xbet free promo code today Sierra Leone"

Did Scientologists Take Over the Today Show?

By Becky Garrison

…em to at least separate the fluff from the facts. On Wednesday morning The Today Show ran a piece celebrating the work of Scientology’s Volunteer Ministers without addressing the concerns raised this organization’s “services,” which are designed by science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard. This story mentions that these counselors are providing “touch assists” without bothering to bring in a representative from the National Mental Health Association…

I Want a Perfect Body

By Jeremy Biles

…gelical devotional diet movements that first cropped up in the late 1950s. Promoting the belief that inner goodness was apparent in one’s outer aspect, this vein of devotion was built on the doctrine that “fat was sin.” A thin, firm, beautiful body, it was believed, was the visible reflection of goodness and godliness. The idea that “fit bodies… signify fitter souls” permeates the American consciousness with anxiety about the body while shaping b…

Religion is Not about Belief: Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God

By Brian McGrath Davis

…for most of Western history “belief” has meant nothing like what it means today. Today, when someone asks me if I believe in God, for example, they are asking if I assent to the proposed verity or the factual existence of God—and usually it is in reference to a very specific understanding of that God. Similarly, if I’m asked if I have “faith in Christ”, the question is whether I agree with the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, died o…

Sex and Civilization: The Body as Battleground

By Jay Michaelson

…asure and marks the subservience of man to divine (or human) authority. We today are Abraham’s heirs, and re-enactors, of countless acts of circumscription. Today, as 2500 years ago, our own bodies are the instruments of authority, power, and control. Religious and political institutions of authority, usually backed up by violence, inscribe themselves on our genitals, our hairstyles, the ways in which we express our sexuality. We learn how to obey…

Christianity Today counsels “patience” on Uganda’s anti-gay law

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

Christianity Today has put its two cents in on the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda, telling gays and lesbians to unwad their knickers over the law and instead exercise “patience as Ugandan leaders sort out among themselves the best way to preserve their culture’s sexual mores.” Instead of strongly condemning this legislation, which President Barack Obama has called “odious,” CT tells us we need to understand the culture and give the Ugandans a fai…

Rejecting the Stranger: Why Rod Dreher’s Vision of Communal Christian Life Is Not So Benedictine After All

By Kaya Oakes

…mmunity, there have been female Benedictine communities for centuries, and today’s best known Benedictine writer is probably the theologian Joan Chittister, who was formerly the prioress of her community, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, PA. As a female religious leader, Chittister’s interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict offers some interesting contrast to Dreher’s. On the Benedictine charism of hospitality, Chittister writes that “Hospitalit…

Obama Foes Misrepresent Islam with “Apostate” Tactic

By Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im

…in the pre-colonial era, as if they are the legal system of nation states today. Apostasy is only a crime in the penal codes of four or five out of the 40 Muslim-majority countries today. Dr. Luttwak claims that “another provision of Muslim law… prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.” This claim implies that there is something called “Muslim law,” which is either the…

A Third Reconstruction? Rev. William Barber Lifts the Trumpet

By Peter Laarman

…finition of “poor.” But if Harriet Tubman could lead hundreds of slaves to freedom with nothing but the North Star, moss on the trees, a pistol strapped to her leg and faith in her heart (despite lack of resources and epilepsy), then today we ought to be able to use the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones and our growing network of churches to educate the new Southern Electorate—black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight, labor, Christian, Je…

Rumors of God’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

By Nathan Schneider

…ig puts it, the online community formed around Edge.org shows that some of today‘s most dynamic scientific minds all but assume atheism. Indeed, it seems implausible that the “dominant viewpoint at the American university” would be lacking intellectual vibrancy (unless, of course, Craig is claiming the intellectual bankruptcy of American academia). No; if nothing else, today‘s atheism is positively fueled by intellectual inquiry. This tone…

Strange Bedfellows: The American Far-Right and Today’s Jihad Do Have Something in Common — Just Not What You Think

By Suzanne Schneider

…t the Islamic State (or ISIS as it’s colloquially known) which argues that today’s jihad has little in common with earlier iterations of that phenomenon but does share certain features with far-right movements in the West, I approach the comparative question from a different angle. Setting aside the terrorism framework, which sidesteps crucial questions about the nature of militant organizations and their appeal at this historical juncture, I inst…