Religion Dispatches
…o $4,208,989. The Nashville, Tennessee-based Southern Baptist Convention/Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission is head by Richard Land. SBC revenue in 2007 amounted to $205,716,834, while ERLC had $3,394,327. Founded by Tim LaHaye, the secretive Council for National Policy is currently headed by Steve Baldwin. The Washington, D.C.-based operation had $1,690,914 in revenue in 2007. Americans United points out on its website that there are a number…
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…de of white evangelicals; the Utah College Exit Poll, however, with a much higher number of Mormon participants, put the number closer to 45 percent. Both figures are well below previous Mormon voting percentages for the Republican candidates, but they indicate that at least half of Latter-day Saints were willing to stomach Trump’s apparent moral deficiencies. This turn of events has historical precedent. Though the LDS Church’s political affiliat…
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…eople stand on opposite sides of a six (or is it a nine?) and argue about which number it is. Backholm initially takes the analogy in an expected direction: the two people disagree about what number it is because they’re looking at it from fundamentally different perspectives. Then he gives us his biblical worldview spin: the person who’s right about the number is the person who knows who made the number and for what purpose. Neither person in the…
Read More…rade in Turkey was held in 2003 with only 30 people at-tending the event. This number increased to around 5,000 attendants in 2010 and rose to more than 10,000 in 2011. The Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers notes, “This year’s Pride took place less than a month after President Recept Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party lost its majority in the Turkish Parliament.The Peoples’ Democratic Party, which supports LGBT rights in the predominantly Muslim countr…
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…The Public Religion Research Institute found that 71 percent of Americans think watching pornography is immoral. Yet moral objection to porn doesn’t stop people from watching. Given the high rate of online porn use documented in highly religious, conservative states, moral pressure may mean that people are watching porn yet feeling guilty for doing so. With easy online porn access, and concerns about its impact on sexuality and interpersonal relat…
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…xpected this,” “it’s like hell without the fire,” “we’ll never understand this thing but we can’t not study it”). This was my entry point: as someone who studies the history of philosophy and theology, I was fascinated by a group of scientists professing a freaked-out, studious devotion to an inscrutable darkness. “Like hell without the fire”- what a telling phrase. In the book you document how cosmologists frequently utilize metaphysical concepts…
Read More…es by well-funded journalists. When developing writer personalities, and achieving hits and comments are the primary goals of a publication, there’s no end to the means that will get you there. The increase in commentary and opinion and the decrease in investigative and reported work can be seen throughout news media and is not limited to coverage of religion. As journalist Pamela Constable points out, only four U.S. papers still maintain a stable…
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…nevertheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed most are much smaller. My concept is this: I think we can create a Christian Honor Corps (CHC) of perhaps 10,000 persons. Persons like myself who take our responsibility to monitor Christian extremist thought seriously and who are w…
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…e idea of marching on the Capitol with a ‘large and wild crowd’ only after his White House advisers and lawyers aggressively tried to quash a quilt of crazy schemes to use federal courts, election administrators, state legislators and ersatz presidential electors to thwart the lawful, peaceful transfer of power. It was a last-ditch resort. And the violence of Jan. 6 would have had its intended effect only if some of those legal machinations had al…
Read More…ril, but when no response was observed Concern Citizens sent the list to a number of Utah sheriffs, police chiefs, legislators, and media outlets. Governor Gary Herbert has called for an investigation to determine if state records were improperly accessed to compile the list. In Utah, where conservative politics are dominated by the membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it’s pretty safe to assume that a significant number…
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