…mmunity that I can lead them to more familiarity with a very great text. A number of times you bring up Thomas Jefferson’s abridgement of the Gospels. He seems to be someone who, in some ways, you’re identifying with but also making very different choices from. I don’t have the luxury of just snipping out the parts of the Bible I don’t like. Whereas I greatly admire Jefferson and the Enlightenment figures for their courage in blasting through so m…
…eminated through Catholic schools, the bishops call marriage equality a “serious injustice” according to the Goalburn Post. Titled “Don’t Mess With Marriage,” the document warns against the perceived dangers of same-gender marriages and says it is “unjust, gravely unjust” to allow same-gender couples equal rights to marriage. The bishops say people “with same-sex attraction” need love and support. “But pretending that their relationships are ‘marr…
…protection,” reports Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which reported no serious incidents in spite of “a small number of counterdemonstrators from the Serbian Orthodox Church holding a sign reading ‘No to Sodomic Revolution.’” But bigger news may be just ahead: Meanwhile, the Serbian parliament convened to launch proceedings needed for the election of Ana Brnabic as the new premier. If elected, the 41-year-old Brnabic would be the first female an…
…futations of Barton’s bogus empiricism. I’ve considered these questions a number of times recently in observing historians struggling to deal with the popularity of figures such as David Barton, who bowdlerize history but get the kind of attention few actual historians receive for their work. To What Effect? These debates go back a long way. When I was in college at a Baptist denominational school in Oklahoma, the biology professor, a man about…
…d that as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s…
…out the cover? I think Beacon did a fantastic job in conceptualizing a number of the ideas in the book with this cover, which includes a male hand clenching a fistful of arrows. In Quiverfull, as parents seek to have a “full quiver” of children, the children become “arrows” in their parents’ arsenal, following the model of Psalm 127, “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is ful…
…lves as charismatic or Pentecostal Christians (38%).” Pinning down precise numbers for LLDM is almost impossible. The church claims to have more than three million members abroad, and 1.5 million in Mexico, which would make it the country’s largest non-Catholic religious institution. The 2010 Mexican census reported only around 200,000 members, but that number may well be low (the Mormon church in Mexico has argued that the religious count was ina…
…y and Marie Osmond captured the nation’s heart. Indeed, the 1970s were a period of optimism within the faith, fueled by warm feelings at home and growth across the globe, and punctuated in 1978 with the long-awaited end to a racial restriction that was one of the last remaining, and painful, legacies from the church’s more parochial era. There were also positive developments within the faith’s nascent intellectual community. A host of Mormon schol…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…mpt to confer legitimacy and prevent debate over a policy by making the spurious claim that the poor will benefit from it.” Last, and sadly, least, Randall’s other “distinguished liberal,” the late Senator Harold Hughes, a Democrat from Iowa. “Distinguished” might be a stretch—Hughes’ unedited memoir, available in The Family’s archive—reveals that he arrived at the conservative Christianity of The Family only after ESP and alien encounters had fai…
…ncy. As historian Andrea Tone has shown in detail, Lysol was just one of a number of unregulated contraceptive products advertised in women’s magazines and in newspapers. Comstockery, in other words, endangered women by creating an environment where quackery and scammers could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a harsh cleaning product had adverse effects. A 1936 book by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M.D. called Facts and Frauds in Feminine Hygi…
