Religion Dispatches
…gars were honored with the Pro-Family Entertainment Award because they are using their reality television show on TLC “to make Christ known and make others see that the Bible is the owner’s manual for life.” Using the Duggars to exemplify good clean Christian living is hardly divorced from politics, either. Just as the Republican Party was gearing up for a full-on assault on Planned Parenthood (which is not just about abortion, but about contracep…
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…ed, “While we should continue to insist that pharmaceutical companies stop using abortion-derived cell lines, given the world-wide suffering that this pandemic is causing, we affirm again that being vaccinated can be an act of charity that serves the common good.” In fact, the Vatican directs people who hold a deep commitment against abortion not to use that as a reason for avoiding vaccination. The Pontifical Academy for Life states there is a “m…
Read More…GOP leadership pushing this assault is out of step with its contraceptive-using base. (Hence the title: Michael, in noting that religious women may be having sex outside of marriage and using contraception, in spite of Vatican teaching that both are sin, noted that people lie even though that’s a sin, too. I had a little retort to that.) There’s a bonus at the end, too: Michael, a traditionalist Catholic, makes the case against beatification of P…
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…ision effectively as a tool, beginning in 1955, to broadcast his meetings, using direct mail advertising to raise money, and even taking the prayer cloth to new heights. Just today, one of my friends, a professor at a Pentecostal seminary, revealed that her mother kept the prayer cloth she received from Roberts to cure her of her barrenness, back in the 1950s, alongside the proof of her healing: her daughter’s birth certificate. Roberts’ televise…
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…in the Livingston Parish school district who enthusiastically talked about using the new LSEA standards to teach kids creationism. Because when you break it down, the concepts are inextricably intertwined. So what are these “enormous differences”? Here is DI’s definition of intelligent design: Intelligent design is the theory that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected p…
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…ious sites in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, the Palestinians are using Netanyah’s declaration for nationalistic purposes. “Palestinians are using religious fervor to ignite the masses in a national struggle,” said Bercovitz, author of Wars over the Holy Sites. “In Islam, religion and nationalism are intertwined together.” Bercovitz acknowledged that Netanyahu made tactical mistakes in his declaration. “He should have also said that these…
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…ssley (R-IA) for possible violation of their church’s tax-exempt status by using donor funds for a non-exempt use all preach the Word of Faith doctrine. The basic tenets of Word of Faith are the power of the born-again believer to call things into existence, including physical, emotional, and material well-being (positive confession), the authority of the believer to confer such benefits on him or herself (often referred to as the “little gods” co…
Read More…Christian values. At the time, the pro-intelligent design organization was using the fundraising document to raise money to “defeat scientific materialism” represented by evolution, and “reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” But now, it looks like the strategy has been expanded to fight a culture war over the interpretation of our nation’s history. Even though…
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…our collective inhumanity—from blowing up planes, to shooting civilians to using rape as a weapon of war—scars our days, has our nighttime entertainment focused on assaying forms of humanness. Was Tony Soprano human? Well maybe, but what about Al Swearengen? Okay, him too, but what about Dexter? Hmm—if he’s inside the tent, what about something that isn’t even a someone? We’ve seen humanoid Cylons, slinky terminators, and programmed “dolls” save o…
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…f the church who are not in alignment with Church teaching on every issue. Using this term, conservatives claim that liberals are too willing to pick and choose which teachings they will follow. But conservatives overlook the reality that the Catholic Church has a very liberal social teaching that places the dignity of the person at its core. This influences the way the Church teaches about aid to the poor, economic justice within taxation systems…
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