Religion Dispatches
…mbed their noses at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops by refusing to buy the bishops’ false claims that the Senate health care bill requires taxpayers to fund abortions. These organizations, in a remarkable move against the church hierarchy, said they were supporting the health care reform bill because it adquately prevented federal funding for abortion and served their social justice goals of providing needed health insurance to 30 million…
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…g children. “Father, our children today are being deceived by the West. To buy them, to give them school fees so that they can be homosexuals. We say no to that,” Oyet said with a rolling voice as a live band played smooth jazz in the background. When Engle himself finally took the microphone at about 5 p.m., he dug almost immediately into the controversy, saying he hadn’t known about the bill and nearly canceled his trip over questions raised by…
Read More…l. (Note: the filmmaker gets a few facts wrong about evolution and I don’t buy his assertion that Charles Darwin is the messiah of atheism. But I’m willing to grant him the artistic license to make his broader point.) Door To Door Atheists Bother Mormons – Watch more Funny Videos I have no doubt that many Christians, particularly fundamentalists and evangelicals, in this country believe they suffer stigma for their religious beliefs. It’s built in…
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…lay a part in the real estate bust. People went to church and were told to buy things they couldn’t afford. I’m not surprised. Underlying that, of course, is a Protestant notion that is also there in Europe, which is that to accumulate wealth shows that you’re blessed by God. That does seem to have remained a through-line in American theological culture. But that was true for [European] Calvinists as well. That’s one of the reasons Holland in the…
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…ow were they found? Who put them up for auction, and why? Why would anyone buy them? And how do we know them to be Galileo’s? Unlike the situation with Copernicus’ remains, there does not seem to be enough material in these poor relics to perform a DNA analysis. Yet the museum’s director, Paolo Galluzzi, has faith; he insists that “all the story is so convincing I cannot think of a reason not to believe it.” The director might be encouraged to thi…
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…Likewise nuclear weapons, human cloning, machine guns and land mines. Cell phones in church are a wash as well and nary a whisper on the need for a satellite feed of Christian programming into godless parts of the world. When it comes to a scriptural basis for handling modern technology we are as far adrift as oil-soaked pelicans: The chains are locked and tied across the door. The environmental movement was a whisper after the publication of Rach…
Read More…unning the risk of alienating networks of pastors and church goers who may buy into the President’s overall but draw the line when it comes to traditional marriage. You put these normally supportive pastors in a tough situation because the fact of the matter is the whole ‘two fathers’ scenario DOES NOT play well in most Churches in America. And that is completely understandable. My first reaction to that concern was, “welcome to our world.” The LG…
Read More…her she is “really a Christian.” However, there are still those who don’t buy her conversion to Methodism. Are social media changing religion? Maybe. But could religion be changing our media, as well? Again, maybe. Apple’s Steve Jobs, a guru for techies, has become a favorite among conservative Christians for his crusade against pornography in the world of Apple. At least one Indonesian celebrity might agree with Jobs. Nazril Irham faces 12 ye…
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…housands of people who have been abused by clergy. The public simply won’t buy it, and the end result is that the institutional Roman Catholic Church will look even more out of touch with reality than ever. I generally refrain from commenting on these matters without the document in front of me, but this is such a classic case of how church law is made—yes, like watching sausage being made—that it invites conjecture. It may turn out that the conce…
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…rd Manly Hopkins. Quite, she agreed. Her audience of theologian-scientists listened nervously, perhaps as Keble College does to the physics labs. Some were worried that she might be taken to be advocating Intelligent Design. And Polkinghorne himself didn’t buy it. What about the conservation laws of physics, he asked—of energy, momentum and charge. They’re clearly universal. And they point to the unity of truth, and beauty of cosmic order, that le…
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