Religion Dispatches
…twork “is asking Christian radio stations in the key battleground state of Ohio to air an ad that suggests Barack Obama would bring an end to the economic woes plaguing the state and the country if elected president,” OneNewsNow, a news service sponsored by the American Family Association, recently reported. Matthew 25 Network founder Mara Vanderslice “says her group is hoping to run its latest pro-Obama ad in Cleveland, Youngstown, Cincinnati, an…
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…viction in American Journalism and Higher Education, argues that a growing number of committed and vocal Catholics and evangelicals in the knowledge industries are making an impact on their respective fields. Moreover, Poynter recently noted that it’s almost impossible to know the numbers of Christians in the nation’s newsrooms. Conor Freidersdorf neatly sums up the reasons why the Gosnell case initially didn’t get more attention, but I would boil…
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…medical examination.’ During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the number of Christian schools opened by conservative evangelical Christians skyrocketed. By the early 1980s, evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell were claiming that evangelicals opened three new Christian schools every day, ostensibly because public schools had become anti-Christian. Yet this surge in Christian school growth coincided with public school desegregation. The…
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No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…
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…married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…
Read More…y adept at assuring voters that gay marriage won’t lead to polygamy. A few phones over, Howard Heller, 58, of Burien, enthusiastically told voters about his own “selfish” reason for wanting R-74 approved: so that he may legally wed Carla Robinson, whose Ohio birth certificate can’t be amended to reflect that she changed genders as an adult. “We would like to get married, but the only way we can right now is if I change my gender, and I’m not throw…
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…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…
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…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…
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…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…
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…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…
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