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The Next Big Religion Issue: Immigration

By Daniel Schultz

Judging by the number of items on the subject carried by Faith in Public Life’s news reel, immigration is the next item on the progressive faith agenda. Personally, I’d rather we kept an eye on financial reform as it shapes up in Congress, but nobody asks me. All the the churches are excited about immigration: you can’t go over to Sojourners without stumbling across at least one immigration-related story. Leaders of the Disciples of Christ and th…

“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…re so fantastic—brought the idea that the whole thing is static. I think a number of people picked up over the past three hundred years that space is empty, we move things around in space, and there are levers and pulleys and buttons. I think for a number of people, atheism is simply the rejection of somebody sitting on a cloud somewhere with a beard who might intervene from time to time. I think quantum physics, the little I know, it just intuiti…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…the height of the battling, that it was all not such a big deal, that the number of dissidents was actually quite small and that he thought his church would be better off once they were gone. Indeed, according to Wikipedia there are over 7,000 Episcopal congregations in the US with over 2 million members, though the significance of that number is unclear since, as the priest in the church where I was baptized once teased me: “when you’re baptiz…

The Conservative Bible Project: Looking for Conservative Diamonds in a Liberal Dung-Hill

By Thomas Fabisiak

…the modern concept of Hell is a post-biblical conflation of motifs from a number of sometimes conflicting biblical and apocryphal notions of sheol, gehenna, Hades, judgment in the end-times, etc. More starkly anachronistic are claims that Jesus taught parables about the “free market” (a late-medieval concept at best), and that the Bible includes “later-inserted liberal passages.” In describing the project, Schlafly has repeatedly cited two such “…

My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

By Kathryn Joyce

…the babies” themselves, both saving money and demonstrating their faith. A number of Quiverfull families follow a similar arc (as had Garrison) graduating from conventional hospital births—often where mothers felt pushed into a birth plan they didn’t desire—to midwife-assisted births at home, to the final challenge of unattended home births. It’s a logical extreme of the movement whose naturalistic bent actually overlaps with the back-to-the-land,…

Can The Religious Left Be Effective Again? Longer Answer: Quizás

By Daniel Schultz

…gh participation rates are increasing among these types of churches, they represent a small percentage of all churches. Fulton explains that a lot of this increase is due to the debates over immigration reform; but even factoring that in, Hispanic churches are becoming more politically active. The number of congregations might be few, but they may also be larger communities, representing a substantial number of people. In any case, the trend will…

How a Ruling for Masterpiece Cakeshop Could Embolden White Nationalists

By Sunnivie Brydum

…or even federal—protections aimed at combatting discrimination against any number of marginalized populations. “The cultural and political prominence of religious freedom as an American ideal draws people to it,” Wenger said. “The reason people appeal to it for all sorts of purposes is because it’s so culturally, politically, and legally powerful.” Indeed, as Wenger’s book documents in deep historical detail, the bedrock American principle has alr…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…

Proposition 8—the Rematch?

By Bill Berkowitz

…promotion of the homosexual agenda.” As might be expected, however, AFA’s number one achievement was the passage of California’s Proposition 8—the anti-same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. ++++++++++ RD Tidbits Wycliffe USA’s “The Last Languages Campaign”: A donor that wishes to remain anonymous has given $50 million to the ministry to be used for “The Last Languages Campaign,” an effort aimed at “translating the Bible into the remaining 2…

Do Atheists Belong in the Interfaith Movement?

By Chris Stedman

…nt and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, an organization I have worked with a number of times (I recently accepted an invitation to join their Speakers’ Bureau) and whose “Living Without Religion” campaign I greatly admire. In his blog, Lindsay wrote that “it’s nice that some politicians are finally willing to acknowledge our existence, but are we so desperate for acceptance that we’ll allow others to condescendingly misdescribe us as adherents of a…