Religion Dispatches
…were plans hatched there to denigrate Romney’s Mormonism explicitly in the service of a Perry candidacy. At least one of the attendees there, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, later defended Romney’s calling out of his anti-Mormon detractors at the Values Voters Summit. To be very clear: Lane is a Christian nation absolutist. About the Renewal and Restoration Projects he’s been behind, he told me in a rare 2008 interview, “What we’re doi…
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…tfits engaged in the War on Christmas — Liberty Counsel and ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice) — are two of the four other sites Boss Creations recommends. A portion of the proceeds of all “CHRIST-mas” Tree sales will go to support the American Center of Law & Justice, an organization recently hailed byBusinessWeek as “the leading advocacy group for religious freedom,” as well as to the Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit litigation, education an…
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…o whose perspectives were these? I was aware that the Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized CIS as a nativist organization that advocates for drastic reductions in immigration. So I decided to attend to hear what they had to say, and to try to figure out if there are any points on which we could ever agree. Panelists were Fr. Dominique Peridans, associate pastor of a Baltimore Roman Catholic parish, CIS Fellow James R. Edwards Jr., and CIS…
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…nput or voices of Gandhi and Wolff, the individuals whose ideas lie at the center of the controversy? A far more supportive move might have been to communicate those concerns directly to Gandhi and Wolff—or to the Praxis Center itself. Ultimately, Gandhi and Wolff’s piece did not deserve to be weaponized by Fox News, but Andrea Jain’s response on RD, framed by the politesse of “avoidance,” was just as inappropriate and unhelpful. It detracts from…
Read More…fty-five fundamentalist Christian leaders met at the Glen Eyrie conference center near Colorado Springs, Colorado. The goal, according to author and activist Mel White in his book Religion Gone Bad was “to plan their ‘short-term’ solution for the problem of lesbian and gay Americans.” The group represented about 40 state anti-gay organizations with one goal, according to White: “to prevent homosexuals from ever being recognized as a ‘protected cla…
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…s levied against Sr. Margaret McBride of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix when, as a member of the hospital’s ethics committee, she gave her consent to a theraputic abortion for a 27-year-old mother of four. As a result, Bishop Thomas Olmstead declared an “automatic” excommunication for McBride, and just recently succeeded in forcing St. Joseph’s to renounce its Catholic affiliation. The black-and-white thinking of Bp. Olmstead…
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…He told me: “Knowing that I now had the capacity and depth of practice to center blackness, to center the ancestors while the mind is quieting, the body softening, and the heart opening, and being able to practice directly with all that comes into my purview, was profound. I discovered that I am my own healer. That was a profound shift in my life.” Berry, who co-founded Deep Time Liberation retreats with Insight teacher Noliwe Alexander, now seek…
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…United States, even as biblical texts and religious identities are at the center of current debates over US-Israel policy and campus protest culture. Allen egregiously misquotes Genesis 12:3 by retrojecting “Israel”—a name given to Jacob later on in Genesis 32:28—into the story of God’s call to Abram and promise to make him into a great nation. In doing so, Allen extends Genesis 12 from a blessing or curse on a single person, Abram, to a covenant…
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…ation Quiz: Does the name of your congregation end not in “Church” but in “Center” (i.e. Magnolia Christian Center as opposed to Magnolia Christian Church)? 1 point Does your pastor use language such as “seedtime and harvest” to describe the act of tithing? 1 point Does your church teach that God wants you to be a millionaire, yet your pastor is the only millionaire in the congregation? 1 point Does your pastor regard the current economic crisis a…
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…ow people of faith can confess God’s presence in new ways. By trying to re-center the body in our theological imagining of how to move forward, I hope I invited us to consider the various embodied ways God works through us and in the world. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? I would say one of the biggest misconceptions about race, especially among Christians who critique our work, is that those of us who do this work ar…
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