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More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

By John Wigger

…llion people visited Heritage USA. Jim and Tammy lived in luxury, buying vacation homes, expensive cars and clothes, and traveling first class with an entourage. Then it all came crashing down. In March 1987 Bakker resigned in disgrace after his 1980 sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn in a Florida hotel room became public. Stories emerged about gay relationships and visits to prostitutes. By the end of the year, PTL was in bankruptcy, headed for l…

What Do ‘The Christians’ Believe? Easter Reflections from a Non-Christian

By Gary Laderman

…iences and moral communities producing ever-increasing differences. Specifically, it can be understood as what historian Philip Jenkins identifies as the global consequences of Christianity’s shifting worldwide alignment to the southern hemisphere; particularly Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How this realignment—‘de-Europeanization’ might be overstating it, but not by much—of Christian communities in America affects politics, ecumenical relation…

Holy Father, You’re Not Helping: The Problem with the Pope’s Plan to Consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

By Katherine Kelaidis

…the Immaculate Conception is also one of the most hotly contested theological issues in ecumenical dialogue between East and West, right up there with papal primacy and the filioque (the “and the son” part of the Nicene Creed)—two issues that helped drive the split in the first place. In light of this history, consecrating two countries with overwhelmingly Orthodox majorities to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, particularly in response to a prophecy…

Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army

By Peter Montgomery

…theological dividing line between good and evil, but also legitimate political fodder because they say it is a source of his collectivist, even Marxist, worldview. And it demonstrates his lack of commitment to the “quintessential American concept” of individual rights. Barton’s theory boils down to this: if it weren’t for revolution-supporting preachers and their doctrine of individual salvation, individual rights would not have been incorporated…

Orthodox Jews Begin to Reckon with Sexual Abuse

By Paul Berger

…country’s largest and most influential Orthodox organizations, the Rabbinical Council of America and the Orthodox Union, co-sponsored America’s first National Jewish Child Abuse Prevention Week. There’s nothing to suggest that sexual abuse is any more or less prevalent in the Orthodox community than anywhere else; but there are a number of peculiarities to Orthodox Jewish life that have made the reporting of abuse less common than in society at l…

New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

…s in the U.S. for comparing their struggles to the struggles of women, African Americans, and GLBTQ citizens. On a global scale, however, secularism most certainly is an issue of civil rights and of human rights. And it’s important to note that the suppression of religious dissent online is being carried out not just by government authorities but also by private corporations. During the Innocence riots, for instance, Google restricted YouTube acc…

My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

By Howard M. Friedman

…n it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?” In the Affordable Care Act cases, some courts have avoided the difficult issue of whether a business has religious conscience rights by instead concluding that the business is so closely identified with its owners that it may assert the owners’ religious objections as its own. This idea—that a corporation and its owners should be treated as the same person—is a well-known concept in corporat…

Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

By Jhas Williams

…dren equally.” Does He? Sure. But it’s certainly not reflective in evangelical teachings. Fix that. I can tell you that Christo-centric Instagram pages would be wise to not play the safe side by clinging to “Christ would want us to unite…” jargon. No. If unity is truly the end goal, it cannot come without first the acknowledgment of wrongdoing and the understanding that peace does not equal passivity. Choose a side. White churches such as Hillsong…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…ular old tree as having profound personal significance. But if you swing Occam’s Razor in the direction of that song, you’re going to slam right into the cross. The critic concludes, “Seven Swans partly succeeds for me because Sufjan rarely steps foot in the excess of pedantic preaching, despite the openly Christian nature of his lyrics here.” The cognitive dissonance required to listen to an album in which play-by-plays of the Transfiguration of…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…s less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course no one denies that Francis is a change for the better. As Jon O’Brien, head of Catholics for Choice, told The Guardian, Francis isn’t so much “a breath of fresh air as someone who has gone into the Vatican with an oxygen tank strapped to his back. He’s got the church out of a ve…