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The Lesser and the Greater Pilgrimage

…icion that I would be more like myself and not so overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. I had stuck with this plan—umrah any time of the year, the further from the three sacred months the better, and then hajj some other year—until my recent stay in Indonesia. I met an Indonesian fashion designer who had one of those life-altering experiences about 15 years ago, after flaunting around in Milan, Italy, where she studied fashion. From that moment on, sh…

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Why Cliven Bundy Wasn’t A Religious Right Hero

…cation of his religious worldview served to insulate him from conservative flight. Bump writes that Robertson’s “comments about black Americans were buried under a rush to defend the right of Christian Americans to express disapproval of gays,” and that, compared to Bundy Robertson “did a much better job leveraging political sentiment in his favor after his controversial remarks.” But Robertson didn’t have to do much leveraging; his comments came…

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The Man in the Red Dress: My Unlikely Friendship with Cardinal Francis George

…man secure in his mortality, I thought as I craned my neck to look for the flight attendant refilling wine glasses. I recalled that unflinching newspaper when I learned Cardinal George had died last week after a lengthy battle with cancer, a disease he’d beaten twice before in the years since I left Chicago and the newspaper job that often put me in his company—whether I’d been invited or not. Cardinal George (or “Frannie G,” as some of us media c…

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More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

…artners in Israel,” notes the Times. “Civil marriage does not exist in the country, where the solemnization of marriage is entirely controlled by the state rabbinate, and homosexual unions are not in themselves recognized.” Vietnam: Couple marries on airplane flight A Vietnamese lesbian couple celebrated a Valentine’s Day wedding on a Vietjet flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok. Pink News notes, “Same-sex marriage is not legally recognized in…

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I Volunteer to Root Out Christian Extremism

…rtheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed most are much smaller. My concept is this: I think we can create a Christian Honor Corps (CHC) of perhaps 10,000 persons. Persons like myself who take our responsibility to monitor Christian extremist thought seriously and who are willi…

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Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

…ments with deep suspicion and, in many cases, outright alarm. There were a number of reasons for this. Protestant ministers enjoyed close ties—social, political, financial, and more—to Chicago’s industrial elite, which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for vio…

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A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…

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On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…

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The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

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Do Atheists Belong in the Interfaith Movement?

…nt and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, an organization I have worked with a number of times (I recently accepted an invitation to join their Speakers’ Bureau) and whose “Living Without Religion” campaign I greatly admire. In his blog, Lindsay wrote that “it’s nice that some politicians are finally willing to acknowledge our existence, but are we so desperate for acceptance that we’ll allow others to condescendingly misdescribe us as adherents of a…

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