Religion Dispatches
…(ARIS)—and several follow-up reports have tracked a rapid increase in the number of people who do not identify with any particular faith tradition. However, the so-called “Nones” have been shown in both studies to be moving not so much from belief to unbelief, as from institutionalized expressions of faith in community to all kinds of “something else.” The “something else-ness,” if you will, of American faith practice is likewise tracked in a rec…
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…a bold new direction in the peace process is not entirely solid, a fact reflected in the same survey. 40% of respondents continue to support West Bank settlements, which, no matter how J Street chooses to spin it, is not an insignificant number. 75% supported the IDF operation in Gaza, though only 41% believe Israel is now more secure. And as for Iran, negotiators and hardliners are running neck-and-neck. The stakes are high. If President Obama a…
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…sounding “No.” Croslow’s belief that the Catholic Church most accurately reflects the intentions of the early church fathers is echoed throughout the movement as other evangelicals seek a church whose roots run deeper than the Reformation. Further, due to the number of non-denominational churches that have proliferated since the Jesus Movement, many evangelicals’ knowledge of their history runs only as far back as the 1970s. These are the young be…
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…Assuming all African Americans believe because they are African Americans flies in the face of a growing trend, tracked by pollsters. The Nones, or unaffiliated, represent a growing percentage of the US population. And African Americans represent an important demographic within this growth. Keep in mind, too, that the number of African Americans falling into this category has almost doubled over the past thirty-years. Belief in God doesn’t bind A…
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…oung persons will read it and will take courage from it. I’ve heard from a number of young LGBTQ persons, black especially, who thank me for the book and said they have wanted a resource like this for some time to combat some of the negative statements that they hear on the regular basis, particularly within the churches, within the churches that they love. I’m telling them to not receive that putrid narrative that God doesn’t love you into your b…
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…om 24 to 20 percent among historically black Protestant denominations. The number of 18-29 year olds among Catholics and evangelical Protestants ticked up 1 percent respectively, and among mainline Protestants it saw a 9 percent increase. In the interest of equity, blacks make up 9 percent of those who are unaffiliated with any religious tradition (“nones”), and of that, the numbers trended upwards among 18-29 year olds. Many news outlets covered…
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…igious exemptions for businesses from providing services such as cakes and flowers for same-sex weddings. For example, the conservative Christian Legal Society encouraged and assisted a number of conservative evangelical and Catholic colleges to seek exemption from title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination. About two dozen schools have been granted such exemptions by the civil rights office of the Department of Education…
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…htenment Types On the surface, Buddhism can look pretty messy. There are a number of conflicting stories about the founder of the tradition. Many Buddhists consider Gautama Buddha to be divine, a savior of humanity, but some don’t. Some Buddhists barely think of him at all. And, despite scientific cosmology, there are a large number of mortal creatures—most of them non-human—inhabiting a spectacular 31-tiered cosmos, from the hell beings and hungr…
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…ned over a twelve month period in my family’s life (as well as a number of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a number of…
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…ave only carried so many bullets with him. Americans knew how to watch the number of reported casualties go up, but we lost our collective minds when we watched the number of confirmed active shooters in Paris go up. The images coming out of Paris in the immediate term were of a city devoured by chaos and fear rather than the stillness of carnage, more terrifying for their uncertainty. There was a brief lull in the digital noise when an official g…
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