Religion Dispatches
…he success by expanding this important programs to six more countries in Africa.” If Christianity has a number of mechanisms to support abstinence and the identity of the one who abstains, it does not employ similar mechanisms to underwrite condom use or to support any identity that values condom use; those mechanisms, with very rare exceptions, are constructed and maintained outside of Christian communities. Most often, when Christians develop an…
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…was very different. Despite the Jim Crow laws and discrimination against African Americans in the South, the country was not as polarized as it is now. President Lyndon Johnson had embarked upon his “Great Society,” seeking to unite Americans in the fight against poverty and racial injustice. Government money was being spent on things like health care, education, and solving urban problems. From the top down there was a message of unity—that we, a…
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…Jewish Paul is deemed to be, and the more we read him within his own historical context, the less parochial his message becomes. Because Paul preached exclusively to Gentiles, we know his message was intended for specific people, namely, for the Gentiles, not for all human beings. This means Jesus is not the universal means to salvation. Jesus saves, but he only saves Gentiles. Paul wasn’t worried about Jews—they were taken care of because they h…
Read More…en though opposition to same-sex marriage seems to be cooling its heels at number three, it’s presence is still felt in just about all aspects of the “value voters” belief system. With abortion remaining at the number one spot, it’s clear that all things sexual continue to occupy the minds of those who seem the most opposed to anyone actually having sex. It’s interesting to view the “value voter” summit in juxtaposition with a new survey conducted…
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…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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…s born in Islam,” or Muslim, collapsing the primordial state with the historical and anthropological state of Muslims. Then it loses the point altogether. So I stay away from that designation and the sometimes arrogance that it causes. The point seems to be for some converts to claim they are returning to their origins, and that origin is Islam in the primordial sense. It is a very convincing discourse, but only by Western Muslims. Muslims born an…
Read More…ed Citizens of the United States” are Mormon. But so too are a significant number of undocumented immigrants living in the American West. As we’ve reported here at RD, the Church’s strongest growth over the last decade has been among Latino populations, and almost 4.5 million Mormons worldwide are Spanish-speaking. Economic downtimes and anti-immigrant outcry go hand-in-hand in American history. And even though Utah has a 7% unemployment rate sign…
Read More…36 benchmarks show significant advances, including sharp increases in the number of LGBT Americans protected by nondiscrimination and family recognition legislation at the state level. Less than one quarter of the indicators are negative, and four metrics show little change (either positive or negative). The report shows that an increasing number of people believe homosexuality to be morally acceptable (49% in 2009, up from 40% in 2000), and whil…
Read More…gious traditions. The stance on this matter of far more significant Puerto Rican Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal leaders was totally ignored. For example, Univision ignored the perspective of the leaders of Puerto Rico’s majority Catholic population. Among them, Arecibo Bishop Daniel Fernández called the day marking the onset of mass gay weddings on the island “a sad day for Puerto Rican society.” “Moved by love and compassion for our neighb…
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…he gives us his biblical worldview spin: the person who’s right about the number is the person who knows who made the number and for what purpose. Neither person in the meme can know the truth of whether it’s a six or a nine until the author of the meme tells them. In other words, while there might be many worldviews, only God can truly tell us the truth of the world. Thus the only worldview that’s correct is the one that acknowledges God made th…
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