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New Poll Reveals a Paradox in Evangelical Support for Donald Trump

…te boundary. Before secular government enthusiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the officia…

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Sharing Many of the Same Flaws as its Subject ‘The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill’ Podcast Puts Blame Anywhere But Where It Belongs

…ys Mark was the first Internet age megachurch celebrity pastor and leading number one podcasts, number one sermon downloads, those kinds of things. So what that did is, elevated Mark to the stratosphere so quickly, whereas you might think…typically they may take 20-30 years of faithful ministry, but the Internet just propelled things with such rapidity, and the Internet only sees how you speak, that’s all the Internet is, it’s all about verbal art…

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The Benedict Opt-Out: Why Christian Self-Isolation Won’t Work

…n will help parents to keep their children faithful. Given the statistical number of Nones among Millennials and Gen X and the seemingly unpreventable increase in those numbers, these children, like Emily, or the children of many homeschooling parents, will eventually encounter peers who are not religiously affiliated. Given the way technology works, they will also inevitably find a way to expose themselves to popular culture. And the question rem…

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Conversion Story #643 (not a real number)

…as Muslim. Here too, I began the practices, but only from books, doing the best I could. Then several months after the shahadah, I was coincidently given a copy of the Qur’an. Then I was hooked. I count my dates of entry from these two points: Thanksgiving day 1972 when I said shahadah, and March 1973, when I was began reading the Qur’an. For some time after that, all I read was Qur’an. Still today if things get freaky I return to just reading the…

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From Pastor to Harvard’s ‘Godless Church’ Planter

…nnect with other clergy persons. Over the past 18 months, I’ve developed a number of relationships with people who contact me because they find themselves in a similar situation. They ask questions, I don’t push. I’m simply a listening ear…someone safe for them to talk to. What was the response to your coming out as an atheist?  An enormous number of Christians have threatened to do physical harm to me. Many others have been kind in their response…

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New Poll Finds “Growing Appetite” for Mixing Religion and Politics

…from electoral politics, as they could signal to candidates that a growing number of voters are interested in hearing them talk about their faith. While the number of Americans who believe it is important for members of Congress to have strong religious beliefs has remained steady since 2010—about 6-in-10, with even more significant majorities among Protestants and Catholics—this poll shows a growing number of Americans who want to hear candidates…

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Dangerous Religion

…be even bolder and say that Protestants, and even more specifically, Anglo-European Protestant men, would appear to be the most dangerous religious individuals in American history. Without question white Protestant males from the colonial era to the dawn of the twenty-first century have inflicted more pain, more suffering, more terror than any other individuals in this so-called “city on a hill.” This historical perspective is placed in sharp reli…

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Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

…Across Empire. It’s a model of transnational scholarship, but also makes a number of fascinating claims regarding the mutual cultural and intellectual affinities among German and Indian intellectuals. What’s your next book? I’m currently co-writing for Oxford University Press a book titled Modern Germany: A Global History, 1500-present. What makes the project interesting to me—and hopefully our audience—is that we’re trying to tell the history of…

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Scottish Episcopal Church Angers Conservative Anglicans With Embrace of Same-Sex Marriage; and more in Global LGBT Recap

…lic church’s moral authority to define marriage, family and what is in the best interest of children was in tatters. Airbnb and other business leaders are working with the Equality Campaign to market a black metal ring with a gap meant to be a visual statement of support for marriage equality. The “Until We All Belong” campaign is designed to keep pressure on government officials who have blocked a marriage equality vote in parliament in spite of…

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Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

…nce existed mainly to train full-time pastors faced reductions in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a…

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