Search for "VIPREG2024 best promo code for 1xbet Puerto Rico"

This Is How You Lose Them: Why “Generation Z” Won’t Be Flocking To Churches Anytime Soon

By Anita Little

…easibility of White’s goal of bringing in Gen Z successfully is dubious at best, as many churches are not meaningfully addressing the social issues that matter the most to Gen Z. How they lost Millennials is exactly how they will lose the tweens. White is correct in saying “the church simply has too many blind spots,” but again, it’s a glaring omission to not name some of those blind spots, particularly when it comes to evangelicalism’s increasing…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on converting others. As a result, Gallup revised its esti…

“Ex-Gay” Common Ground More of a Killing Ground

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…point is that people can leave whatever it is that God calls less than His best and move into something that is His best, becoming more like He is. Honestly, this isn’t news. So-called “ex-gay ministries” have long given up the promise of turning homosexuals into heterosexuals. True, some who say they’ve “left homosexuality” have married opposite gender partners and had children. Here we can begin the long argument over Alfred Kinsey and his conti…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…nvented in 1991 by a pair of marketing consultants, whose methods were, at best, sketchy. The persistence of these categories shouldn’t surprise anyone. Generalizations are appealing. They make good copy for journalists. “Polls that produced generalizations about the national population,” Wuthnow writes, “spoke to the nation’s historical awareness of itself as a distinct people.” In the case of religion, they made it possible to imagine some kind…

Evangelical “Sexual Purity” Is Not About Sex—It’s About Power

By Sara J. Moslener

…aders? Sexual purity movements, past and present, are not ultimately about promoting a biblical view of sexuality. They are about explaining large-scale culture crises (e.g. Anglo-Saxon decline, the Cold War, changing gender roles and sexual mores) and providing a formula for overcoming those crises. Today’s movement is laden with a therapeutic rhetoric that presents these choices as the best choices for those who seek to conform their behaviors t…

The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

By Neil Ellingson

…ver I went—in my backpack to school, biking through my neighborhood. At my best friend’s house, we marched around his yard and the woods behind his house pretending we were preachers prophesying the end of the world. It gave me a thrilling sense of power to possess this secret knowledge that everyone else was too blind to see. Whether as a prop in playacting or simply toted around my pre-adolescent life, having the white inscrutable Bible close at…

RDBook: Power Belongs to God

By Nathan Schneider

…merican political fundamentalism. Sharlet, who has since become one of the best journalists covering American religion today (and a columnist for Religion Dispatches), got a remarkable scoop some years back. An acquaintance invited him into Ivanwald, the community in Arlington, Virginia, that exposed him to a network of which few outsiders are aware. He calls it “The Family,” though it goes by several names; some incorporated, others not. Beginnin…

Gay Mormons Tie the Knot

By Johnny Townsend

…yman, about a gay Mormon missionary in Italy, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2011, and my latest, Marginal Mormons, just received a starred review from Kirkus.) I also marched with the Mormons for Marriage Equality contingent this year in Seattle’s Gay Pride parade, amazed to see compassionate Mormons with signs proclaiming “Sorry we’re late!” I belong to Affirmation, an organization for LGBTQ Mormons. I still have my triple combination on a…

A Long History of Blaming the Jews

By Gordon Haber

…lly to a logic that treated the relative ‘Jewishness’ of a teaching as the best test of its truth or falsity.” Marcion, Tertullian, Justin, Origen and Jerome differed on crucial Christological and scriptural questions; still most identified any hint of carnality as “Jewish” and accused their opponents of “Judaizing.” Augustine took the trope even further, arguing in Against Faustus that the Jews were the living exemplar of falsity, “proof to belie…

Raising Children the Right Way

By Jeffrey Feldman

…bad behavior, but an opportunity to express love. According to Dobson, the best chance to communicate comes after an episode where the parent has physically hurt the child: For this reason, parents should not dread or shrink back from confrontations with their children. These occasions should be anticipated as important events, because they provide the opportunity to convey verbal and nonverbal messages to the boy or girl that cannot be expressed…