Religion Dispatches
…usly by voters while you run for President, back up your claims with facts. Can you match 43 Nobel Laureates, or do you fold? Kopplin is testifying before Louisiana lawmakers today urging them to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act….
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…present “the theory of creation as presented in the Bible.” Mississippi’s, Louisiana’s, and Tennessee’s laws are circumspect in comparison, not mentioning any supposed alternatives to evolution. Tennessee’s law omits the e-word altogether, although its target was sufficiently clear that it won the nickname “the monkey bill” when it was under consideration in the legislature. Misguided legislators continue to propose such laws today. Arkansas’s Hou…
Read More…ain contentious, the avoidance of religion seems almost studious. Even the Tennessee Family Action Council, in a screed that evokes the Civil War, Obamacare, and the specter of “homosexual activists,” doesn’t mention religion at all. And, finally, Chattanooga isn’t even the first municipality in southeast Tennessee to extend benefits to same-sex couples. Collegedale, home of Southern Adventist University and a center of Seventh-Day Adventist life…
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…he performed at Wild Goose in July . He spoke with Jesse James DeConto by phone in June. What did your upbringing impress on you as most important for your Christian identity? I don’t know that I really was having those sorts of conversations. As an Episcopalian I was participating in the liturgy. I was living into the liturgical calendar. I was in Sunday School, with certain stories about Jesus and about Scripture. The discussions about what i…
Read More…slogans about immigration reform. On line I heard that parishes with large numbers of undocumented immigrants had received many tickets. No outside food or water, statues, gifts or selfie sticks were permitted. Despite 10,000 folding chairs, most of us would have no choice but to stand. Once in my appointed place behind the last row of seats, I found myself in a community of fellow pilgrims, lottery winners from local parishes, nearby colleges, an…
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…ualism is bad. Also, he notes but offers no explanation for the decreasing number of marriages in many countries. I am glad to see that in Section 34 he understands this basic fact of contemporary western culture: The ideal of marriage, marked by a commitment to exclusivity and stability, is swept aside whenever it proves inconvenient or tiresome. The fear of loneliness and the desire for stability and fidelity exist side by side with a growing fe…
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…ich whites were victims rather than aggressors. At the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, contemporary displays about the Dakota War continue to present a narrative of white innocence. Krueger explains, “The Kensington Rune Stone became a tool in a ‘cosmic war’ between the forces of savagery and civilization that used a mythic past to justify the policies of the present.” While the majority of the Scandinavian immigrants to the Midwest wer…
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…nage of Moscow were formerly members of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Moscow Synod is explicitly tying its decision to create the new exarchate and welcome these clergy to the Patriarch of Alexandria’s decision to acknowledge the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Now that the conflict has moved to Africa, its political implications have become even more stark. The Orthodox Church in Africa is neither wealthy n…
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…Holy and Great Council. All of the ancient Patriarchates (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem) and the ancient Church of Cyprus are facing the tragedy of persecution and martyrdom among their faithful. At the same time, they are the Churches right in the middle of the refugee crisis as well as the Churches that have the most experience, and also the most to contribute from coexisting alongside their Muslim brothers and sisters—espec…
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…ies. This became especially clear to me last year, when I taught Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa in an introductory theology class. Both of these early Christian theologians taught a version of apocatastasis, the restoration of creation to its primordial condition at the end of history. Although the issue is exegetically and theologically complicated, apocatastasis seems to have meant, for both of these patristic thinkers, a belief in un…
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