Religion Dispatches
…same discussion and the same struggle. We come together around the common search to discern what it means to be Christians in today’s world. What makes us the United Church of Christ is that we talk to one another, not that we agree with one another. For that reason, I have been sharply critical both of liberals within the denomination who think that everyone should hold to a progressive theology, and of evangelicals who have chosen to stomp out…
Read More…as the story of Moses sending spies into the land of Canaan in the Book of Numbers. So also is the story of the Pheonix after landing on Mars—except that the scouts are mechanical scoops operated by computer in a landing module. And the reports are not told in person to a band of wanderers in a desert, but beamed back by satellite to scientists in a lab in Pheonix Arizona. The religious overtones of exploration have been with us ever since humans…
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…continue, a many-issued discussion among an ever-changing group of people searching for what constitutes good news—what fires to kindle in this life between the ashes of Lent. If the search is to be a hopeful one, those who’ve been silenced will find in the conversation a voice, breath to blow on the embers of our lives together—creating a place to glimpse the mysterious intensity and ordinary beauty of human life. That’s where you’ll find Isaac,…
Read More…s forms a central part of that effort. (Please go ahead and do that Google search on earlier nullification fun times in US history.) If I am misrepresenting these positions, by all means call me on it. But if I describe them accurately, don’t we have a responsibility to say that these positions have the sulfurous stench of Satan about them? Not in precisely those words, perhaps But we have many valid ways—and many long-accepted homiletical, liturg…
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The release of new research last month indicating that activists from the religious right and religious left occupy two separate universes prompts me to reflect yet again on the extreme difficulty of attempting to find meaningful common ground positions, except on sky-is-blue issues like opposition to human trafficking and state-sponsored torture. There are occasions in life in which polarization simply means that the opposing parties should try…
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…ulture’s psychedelic movement, asked the world, “are you experienced?” The search for such an authentic experience is essentially a spiritual one—a quest for an authentic experience with the divine, transcendent, that which lies beyond this physical realm. Authenticity is one of the most deeply felt needs of our time, particularly among Gen X and Millennials. Authenticity, as Robert W. Terry, the late director of the Reflective Leadership Center a…
Read More…. Responses ranged from mild disappointment to vows to replace Google with search engines like Bing (which decorated its homepage with Easter eggs). But what underlies nearly all the comments is the assumption of the whiteness of U.S. Christianity alongside the pairing of brownness with particular political agendas. In this instance, brownness (represented by Chávez) is anti-American, anti-capitalism and, because of calendrical happenstance, anti-…
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…rack of their appointments, and now, functioning as a combination Tivo and Search Engine (that is, not simply recording programs they might like to watch but searching for references to the family and its interests across all of the channels and storing them for future viewing). I recall the early videos produced by cyber-advocates promising an age of intelligent agents who knew us, knew our regular contacts, knew our interests, and just made sure…
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…choice Christian pastor, counsel a woman about abortion, I try to help her search for the decision that is right for her and, if she wishes, others in her life. Her decision is private and individual, a matter of conscience, personal circumstances that she knows best, and medical facts that only she and her doctor know. The last thing on my mind is “common ground.” The president rightly wants us to lower the decibel level of the debate over aborti…
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…death threats, the synagogue of the judge who signed the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search warrant was forced to cancel its Shabbat service. And this is hardly an isolated incident. Antisemitism is becoming more and more overtly accepted on the Right and in the Republican Party more broadly. Especially since the raid of Trump’s Florida estate, we’ve seen an acceleration of the rhetoric and increased calls for violence against Jews on pro-Trump sites. Right…
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