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A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…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…

Bill Gates’ Comments on Covid-19 Vaccine Enflame ‘Mark of the Beast’ Worries in Some Christian Circles

By Christopher James Blythe

…fears of a powerful federal government. A 1943 letter to the editor of the Pampa Daily News was representative of this growing resentment coupling conspiracy with apocalypticism: We should count it dishonorable for a free people to produce a ration card, a birth certificate, an identification card, a social security number – they are what Christian men used to brand as the ‘Mark of the Beast’ of state absolutism and dictatorship. Every time we pro…

Pious White Reformers and Race, Then and Now

By Peter Laarman

…tion” of black people ruled out normal social intercourse—widespread emancipation without separation of the races was unthinkable Although “degradation” was first used to describe the condition of enslaved Africans, by 1810 the term was also being applied to Native Americans. And while a number of enlightened whites believed that the natives of this continent had nobler natures than white people, the problem (again) was that they had been rendered…

RDPulpit: Israel in Gaza: Right but not Smart

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

…unnecessarily provocative, and represents deep self-destructiveness on the part of Palestinians who believe that this refusal to acknowledge Israel’s rights is the only symbolic weapon they have left. To many Israelis, trapped in their own history as survivors of genocide and oppression, Hamas’ refusal to give official recognition is a way of saying, “We’ll wait till we have adequate military power, and then we’ll break any de facto truce and ceas…

Wesolowski Sexual Abuse Case a New Approach or Same Old Same Old?

By Mary E. Hunt

…crimes and reactions to them invite critical analysis. First, what does a papal nuncio do in the Dominican Republic, or anywhere else for that matter? It’s not as though there’s a Vatican consulate handling visas, or reciprocal military and political policies to iron out. Supposedly this office of nuncio, dating to the 16th century, is the liaison between the Holy See (Vatican City State) and the local church. How odd that a Polish priest would b…

Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

By Chris Stedman

…he murder of a Sikh man named Balbir Singh Sodhi by a man shouting, “I’m a patriot!”) But while Harris may be convinced that he can parse arguments for profiling people who “look Muslim” from Islamophobia, the thing about words—especially words put forth by highly visible public intellectuals—is that they have consequences. Unintentional though they may be, such sentiments reinforce and perpetuate the broader cultural climate of Islamophobia. Terr…

Record Numbers Voted for More Death and More Racism; Can We Really Just Come Together as a Nation?

By Peter Laarman

…posed to find a way to reconcile with them? I can’t, and I won’t. The only path forward I can see is the path of confrontation and struggle and relentless organizing for power—nonviolently, of course, but without the genteel gestures toward bipartisanship and compromise centrist Democrats are so fond of. Commentators who have been saying for some time that we’re already embroiled in a slow-rolling civil war have got it mostly right. And today’s se…

Why the Church is Struggling to Hold Onto Millennial Catholics

By Kaya Oakes

…h and Religion at Notre Dame, says the situation with Catholic millennials participating in church culture is “in fact, grim.” Only 16% of millennials self-identify as Catholic according to Pew. That 16% is the group the church is struggling to hold on to. So if they are increasingly choosing the liberal side in the culture wars, are they really still Catholic? Canon Law 204.1 states that a Catholic not only has to be baptized, but also “share the…

Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ed.” But the pope — who did not say the word “gay” as he has before in his papacy, or use the word “homosexuality” as his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, preferred — told bishops the solution to responding to a society that no longer agrees with church doctrine is not to rehash the church’s views, but instead reach out to spread their faith through friendship. “Gratitude and appreciation should prevail over concerns and complaints,” Francis said….

Church and State in Japan: The Case of the Yasukuni Shrine

By Mark R. Mullins

…he glorification of so many tragic deaths and promotion of the view that Japan’s past wars were all about liberating Asia from Western colonialism and oppression. Since the Yasukuni Shrine has been unwilling to comply with requests for cancellation of enshrinement and removal of names from the register, a number of individuals decided to pursue legal action against both the shrine and the Japanese government. Several years ago, lawsuits were launc…