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First Congregational UCC, Ripon Wisconsin

Cheese State Reality Check: On The Wisconsin Idea and the Social Gospel

By Daniel Schultz

…to lefties. Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card! Click HERE to take our 2-minute reader survey. LaFollette wasn’t a particularly religious man, but Bascom and Van Hise were, and so were many of the people who created the Wisconsin Idea: a broad vision of good government based on good information and good intentions making the world a progressively better place. As Raushenbush points out, there’s a lot of overlap between the Wisconsin Idea and the…

Is The Religious Left Emerging as a Political Force? No.

By Daniel Schultz

…lling the same story about this Religious Left that’s going to be here any minute now! for a very long time. Hell, I’ve even been a part of some of those efforts. And yet the movement never does arrive. It never arrives because the left (or at least the Democratic party) is too diverse and its priorities too different for anything like a mirror-image of the Religious Right to coalesce. Also, nobody on the left wants anything like the obnoxious aut…

The Question is: What Kind of Football Does God Fancy?

By Jeffrey Scholes

…here merely to give him “the strength to endure” the trial of the first 55 minutes of the 60 minute game. Instead, it was “God setting it up, to make it so dramatic, so rewarding, so special.” Reminiscent of the biblical story of Job, Wilson’s God intentionally made things difficult for most of the game only to guide Seattle to the improbable win—all as a test of the main character (Wilson), and presumably for the sake of a dramatic ending. While…

How a Mormon Spring Break Ritual Came to Include a Whole Lot of “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama”

By Spencer Dew

…playing the flute: “As drops of ocean water have the ocean’s qualities in minute degree, our forms and personalities are infinitesimal samples of the infinite Supreme Person.” Krishna, moreover, is understood as present in the mantras the crowd is encouraged to chant, The chanting and singing—kirtan, the performance of musical worship within ISKCON—is “what drives us” to hold the Festival in Spanish Fork and around the country, said founder Kirta…

Intolerance in Indonesia Extends to Religious Minorities; Lutheran Church in Norway OK’s Same-Sex Marriage, But Not in Finland; Catholic Church Warns Australian CEOs to Back Off Marriage Equality Support; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…— which says it promotes freedom of love and gender equality — at the last minute, after Islamists threatened to beat up participants… Gays and lesbians suffer discrimination and worse in Bangladesh where homosexuality is a crime punishable by a maximum life term, although prosecutions are rare. However, the Roopbaan rally, which was denied permission late on Wednesday, had been allowed to go ahead in the previous two years… Police have stepped up…

Jennifer Knapp and Me: Coming Out While Evangelical

By Suzanna Krivulskaya

…instructed me to write and rehearse what they called a “testimony”—a three-minute story of my conversion; the more dramatic, the better. Knapp provided the soundtrack to my life as a young, zealous believer. I wanted to be broken in ways she described, so that God’s salvific work would manifest more vividly in my story. I didn’t have to try hard to be broken, of course. By the time I was in college, studying theology to become a missionary, I had…

Billy Graham Is Probably Not the Author of His Own “Final Chapter”

By Elesha Coffman

…to take the world with him into this diabolical place. Don’t think for one minute that Hell will be the “hottest” happy hour of all. Those who find themselves there will remember the hour of decision that determined their fate; they will face the inferno of God’s wrath that will last not for an hour but for all the never-ending hours of forever. Graham alluded to God’s wrath back in 1983, but he foregrounded God’s “great love, mercy, and grace.” T…

Conservative Bishops Headed For Synod Victory?; Indonesian Sharia Official Says Gay Caning Law Meant To ‘Safeguard Human Dignity’; Slovenian Court OK’s Referendum on Marriage Equality Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…elt like a deep betrayal when local officials banned the march at the last minute and police turned tear gas, plastic bullets, and water cannons on participants. (Turkish LGBT activists are not sure why the event was shut down after years without incident, but it fell during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and came in the wake of a defeat at the ballot box for the party of Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.) “I thought we were safe…

Feminist Critics of Wearing Hijab in Solidarity Fall Into Same Old Traps

By Mariam Durrani

…im community has been stuck over the last few days. Can we just stop for a minute? While I can agree with Nomani and Arafa’s critique of Wahhabi, Saudi-funded Islamist groups that support more conservative and often sexist ideologies and policies across the Muslim world, I’m hesitant to rope the hijab into this socio-political and economic constellation of issues. The arc of their argument goes something like this: non-Muslim Americans should not…

How to Die in America: A Conversation with Ann Neumann

By Ellie Faustino

…are able to restart my lungs, but I was without oxygen for more than four minutes. At the hospital, a few days after I’m admitted, I’m given a feeding tube (all of which would happen at any hospital in the country). After a few weeks, let’s say I’m diagnosed as being in a [Persistent Vegetative State]. My brain stem still has some functionality, I can maybe open my eyes, I move, I sleep, and I open my mouth. But significant parts of my brain are…