Religion Dispatches
…in Tebow family story, which was point of this ad.” Traffic to FOFA’s web site increased forty times, and a million people viewed a video interview of the Tebow family by Focus on the Family’s president, Jim Daly. Earll said the interview has a “moving, powerful pro-life message, and has strong gospel message also.” The goal of the ad, she added, “was to start a new dialogue in the country, to move us away from telling people what to think, and t…
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…church was created in the image of those values. As the congregation’s website says, We are proud that this church believed its calling was to follow the example of Jesus Christ, and in doing so to be controversial and even radical. It certainly was. A few years later, a meeting was announced at a church worship service. Members of the congregation helped to organize a new and uncompromising political party with a candidate whose very nomination…
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…e Killers’ Brandon Flowers—and member-generated profiles on the mormon.org site as evidence of non-sinister Mormon humanity. Even if the ads overstate the diversity of the faith, as Haglund suggests, how Mormons navigate our faith is certainly more complicated than Hitchens allows, especially when he characterizes us as a uniform mass that can, for example, be “ordered” by our “supreme leaders” to “turn about and shun any members who show any sign…
Read More…Congress to investigate “creeping shari’ah,” talked to the conspiracy web site World Net Daily, claiming “that CPAC has come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law.” Gaffney’s exhibit A is Suhail Khan, a member of the American Conservative Union board, which annually sponsors the Conservative Political Action Conference. WND’s piece is based on Gaffney’s charges “that Islami…
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…government properties in exchange for that lake. They were even given the site of the old gymnastics venue from the 2004 Athens Olympics, which they immediately set about converting to lease to a for-profit (!) hospital. These various monastic holdings are now estimated to be worth somewhere between one and two billion dollars. When the sweet scale of this deal became public, heads of state rolled. This scandal literally brought down the Karaman…
Read More…jailed for refusing to marry a gay couple. The story came from a fake news site. Not like Jon Stewart fake news. Or even Onion fake news. Actual fake news. “By the way,” Stetzer added, “if you are a pastor you should already know that no one can make you officiate anything. In fact, you can refuse to officiate an interracial marriage. You’d be an idiot and a racist, but you wouldn’t be arrested.” The other “story” Stetzer highlighted claimed “a so…
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…nds of guys back to Folsom Field at the University of Colorado in Boulder, site of the first stadium rally in 1992. Back then, the event’s motto was, “What Makes a Man?” The question set the stage for years of ministry targeted exclusively to men: grandfathers, dads, their sons, single men. But things were different for “Ignite and Unite,” the rollout of PK 2.0. This time, the ladies were invited too, a sign of the movement’s reinvention. Promise…
Read More…hat warned: We have arrived at a most urgent time in history. Some elected officials in California—the governor and a number of legislators—have decided that the vote of the people means NOTHING. For reasons known only to them, they have indicated that they want the vote of the people concerning Proposition 8 overturned. To date, 44 legislators as well as the governor are petitioning the California Supreme Court to declare Proposition 8 unconstitu…
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…Japanese internment. “Was Barack Obama a Muslim?” was posted to Pipes’ Web site just before the New Year and appears to be the first example of this intellectual virus, the most prominent symptom of which is an obsessive suspicion that Obama is a taqiyya-practicin’ crypto-Muslim out to pull the wool over America’s eyes. The virus had leapt species, from demagogic radio rants (the knuckle draggers of AM radio began spewing the “Manichurian Moslem”…
Read More…n takes control in ’09 and “is not watchful,” it would bring a host of new officials to Washington who are unsympathetic or even actively inimical to the interests of religious groups. “Not a few may be in more agreement with Christopher Hitchens’ maxim that “religion poisons everything” than with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s or Mr. Obama’s public affirmations of faith.” And their resistance to any and all things religious would apparently fue…
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