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Pricking the Conscience of Churches: From AIDS Activism to Ending World Hunger

By Susan Henking

…assed in most situations to admit that or to publically advocate for their use. Some of my earliest essays focused on what John Wesley would do. Our denomination has a great heritage of being involved in healing care. Wesley operated his own medical clinic in London and handed out medical tracts as well as spiritual leaflets. He was quite non-judgmental and very much concerned with caring for persons without stigmatizing. I don’t think it is too m…

Blame Muscular Christianity for Driscoll Fiasco

By Hollis Phelps

…onal churches, such as Mars Hill Church and those affiliated with Acts 29, use means that otherwise may be deemed suspect, for the ultimate end of reaching and saving “the lost”? Thus when Driscoll and his church were accused of gaming the system to catapult Real Marriage to best-seller status, Mars Hill’s Justin Dean justified the campaign as follows: Mars Hill has made marketing investments for book releases and sermon series, along with album r…

The Leadership Crisis at the End of the Megachurch Era

By Benjamin Dueholm

…, and lack of accountability, which, in effect, he had become. Strongmen abuse their people, verbally or even physically, and shelter other kinds of abuse behind opaque leadership structures and authoritarian rules. Mark Driscoll, the butch young fellow who built a Seattle-area megachurch, was celebrated for his strongman style, which included using juvenile language against people whose sexual orientations and gender expressions he didn’t approve…

Buffalo and Uvalde Both Appear to Have Involved the AR-15, the Rifle Revered by the Christian Right

By Brad Stoddard

…ion; watching out for his own.” This god demands justice and is willing to use violence to achieve His ends. For people like Rev. Jones, the same God who sanctioned mass killings in the Hebrew Scriptures is the same God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah; who came to Earth in the form of Jesus and who (according to Matthew 10:34) came not to “bring peace, but a sword;” who will return as Jesus with a robe dipped in his enemy’s blood (Revelation 19:1…

A Memoir of Jewish, Transgender Spirituality

By Joy Ladin

…s I applied to what I said about myself: to only say what was necessary to promote understanding about the difficult issues I was discussing. I felt morally obligated to talk about the ways in which my ex-wife and children suffered as a result of my transition, because such suffering is widespread in families that go through gender transition. I felt obligated not to talk about things that would only apply to my ex and my children, and I asked my…

Can Christians Lie? How Conservative Evangelical Bible Interpretation Has Shaped ‘Truth’

By Christopher Douglas

…, we’ve come to expect routine deception from the President—as well as, to use the more technical term from Philosophy, “bullshit.” But what about dissembling from the White House spokesperson, a known evangelical Christian whose Southern Baptist preacher father Mike Huckabee advised her “to be honest” as the press secretary—or other Christians serving in the Trump Administration? Could a Christian lie? Obviously, Christians can lie—like other hum…

Religion Comes to its Senses

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…heologians like Origen who say “No, incense is bad, that’s what the pagans use.” But obviously they had to say it because people were using incense. I mean, you don’t issue a prohibition of something that no one’s doing. And then after the fact you have to make the rules. You could probably find that alternate church history you were looking for that way: “Things that have been banned” gives you information about those practices. Right, and then h…

Fake Rabbi Showdown

By Peter Manseau

…Waldman, however. Though blowing the shofar (a curved piece of ram’s horn used like a trumpet) is usually reserved for the Jewish High Holy Days, Waldman now blows his at every opportunity. He has done so for Unification events across Asia and Europe, occasionally referring to his patron as “Rabbi Moon.” What’s in it for him? As he explained it at the time, he had been single when he first crossed paths with the Unification Church. But then, he s…

R.I.P. Pope John Paul’s “Contraceptive Mentality”: 1979–2014

By Patricia Miller

…ration (or two) of Catholic women from the church. Not only were women who used contraception selfish harlots, but the very use of contraception was leading them to have abortions: It may be that many people use contraception with a view to excluding the subsequent temptation of abortion. But the negative values inherent in the “contraceptive mentality”… are such that they in fact strengthen this temptation when an unwanted life is conceived. … Th…

Pelosi Attacker’s New Age Spirituality and Belief in QAnon is no Contradiction

By Susannah Crockford

…eracy. On social media, this conspiracy theory spread, along with frequent use of the images of the Berkeley house with the Pride/weed flag and school bus (which displayed a sign about the psychoactive substance ibogaine as a “natural addiction treatment”), to claim DePape is both gay and left-wing, and that the attack on Pelosi was therefore not perpetrated by anyone on the Right. What’s formed is essentially a conspiracy theory about a conspirac…