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Gun Ownership: ‘An Obligation to God’

By Julie Ingersoll and Sarah Posner

…erties. That’s really the same concept.” In an essay posted on the GOA Web site, “What Does The Bible Say About Gun Control?,” Pratt argues that “resisting an attack is not to be confused with taking vengeance, which is the exclusive domain of God,” citing Romans 12:19. That domain of God, he maintains, “has been delegated to the civil magistrate” who is “God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.” Likewise, Titus, in h…

Kung Fu Nuns, The Beatles, & Amish Healthcare: The Week In Religion… Poetically

By Christopher Marchsteiner

…State claimed that homosexuality, not celibacy, was the cause of the high number of pedophilia cases in the Church. The Vatican issued a long overdue policy Monday that bishops must report sex abuse cases, but it did not impose a zero tolerance policy similar to what is in place in the U.S. Focus on the Family was for the possibility of a gay Supreme Court nominee before they were against it. Televangelist Joyce Meyer condemned the Uganda Anti-Ga…

Jesus Goes to the Dark Carnival: Hell House Gets a Makeover?

By W. Scott Poole

…g Queen of her high school. To quote from the official Judgement House Web site’s description of the narrative: “our homecoming Queen went home for eternity to be with her King, Jesus Christ.” In some respects, the Judgement House phenomenon carries much more subtle power than the Hell Houses, even as they are less overtly political. The Hell Houses were gaudy and gothic, a fantasy universe where you felt you were being pursued by a Cosmic Torture…

The Martyrdom of Cecil the Lion

By Jacob J. Erickson

…ing countries) are not entirely free of culpability either. Perhaps the be best response to violence is to regard Cecil as a martyr, a witness that charges us to ask how we interact with, treat, respond to other creatures on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps, like Jamie Lorimer does in his most recent book Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), “think of the wild as the commons, the everyday affect…

New Ex-Offender Program Puts Church Ahead Of State

By Mark Bergen

…n email, “could raise serious Constitutional problems.” Content on its Web site, he continued, suggests “Out4Life is designed to funnel ex-prisoners to churches for reentry programming. If state funds are being used to support this effort, state money could be unconstitutionally supporting religious indoctrination.” There is not, Out4Life staff claim, a direct line connecting prisoners from PFM programs inside prison to those outside. Their progra…

Texas Textbook Massacre

By Lauri Lebo

…en and minorities should be thankful to the ruling white male majority for bestowing them with equal rights. (See video here of his statement which begins at about 4:00.) Three of McLeroy’s fellow conservatives lost their races as well. Randy Rives and Joan Muenzler, who were backed by groups such as WallBuilders and the Texas Pastor Council, also lost their primary races. In addition, Austin attorney Brian Russell, whom board member Cynthia Dunba…

In Crisis, Catholic Church Plays ‘The Jew’

By Benjamin Weiner

…atican (as I have argued here before), it seems that only an equal and opposite cataclysm was able to get the Jews off the hook for the murder of God Himself. Christian guilt displaced Jewish guilt. The heinous legacy of Nazi Jew-killing was reified and its implications elevated almost to the level of official Church doctrine, as evidenced by the way a certain stripe of Catholic clergy still reverently intones the word “Shoah.” One of my congregan…

Satire is Religion

By Austin Dacey

…of Muhammad, upon conquering Mecca he went to the Kaaba to purge the holy site of pagan relics and religious icons—with the exception of representations of Mary and Jesus, which he ordered to be preserved. From the outside, it is easy to miss the fact that having one’s saints satirized is a way of being baptized into the American “civil religion.” A community is not a full member of this society until its sacred cows have been slaughtered publicl…

Closing with Gospel in Morocco

By Hussein Rashid

…s. I am not sure why, but the Moroccan audience—and Bab Makina has a large number of upper-class Moroccans in attendance—really enjoy gospel. It’s an appreciation that appeared to cut across generations. Based on comments I heard, people are aware that many of the songs praise Jesus as the son of God, an idea that is anathema to Muslims. Unfortunately, I could not understand the appeal, outside of the aesthetic, but it was wonderful to see so many…

Anti-Gay Groups Running Out of Search Engines

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ce that should be taken into consideration.” Readers commenting on the Fox site are vowing to boycott Google in favor of Bing, Microsoft’s latest venture into the search engine business. They might want to rethink that move, too, since Microsoft was one of the first companies to include sexual orientation in its non-discrimination policies and actually offers “partial coverage for transgender surgery (effective in 2006) to its existing coverage of…