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A Great Gulf Fixed: Implications of the Vanishing Religious Middle

By Peter Laarman

…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 harder to forge common positions. This is not one of them. An inconvenient truth here is that religious conservatives often sacralize their positions in ways that make them immune to compromise, whe…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…gone some fifty days following the first Easter. While sitting around in a blue funk, they heard a loud whoosh from on high and then saw tongues of fire dancing among them, one little tongue resting on each of these sad sacks. They started babbling in strange languages. Mass confusion ensued until Peter stood up and explained that this must be what Jesus meant when he said he would be sending his spirit, with power, to keep the work going. They tu…

A Nazi, a Jewish Prisoner, and a “Magic” Bible, Or, Christian Romance Fiction Gone Very, Very Wrong

By Julia Seymour

…novel, published by Bethany House last year, tells the story of a blonde, blue-eyed Jewish woman who is rescued from a firing squad by a Nazi commandant and becomes his secretary. She hatches a plot to save people from the trains to Auschwitz and her uncle, Morty, foils a plan that would have killed the commandant. The commandant pressures her to kisses and into an engagement. And, in the way of magical realism, a Bible appears and she learns to…

“Project Blitz” Seeks to Do for Christian Nationalism What ALEC Does for Big Business

By Frederick Clarkson

…erpiece Cakeshop decision—no matter how it’s decided—and whether or not a “blue wave” rises in this year’s statehouse elections. But regardless of judicial and legislative outcomes in the near term, this package of legislation and legislation like it, will continue to inform and even define much of the Christian Right’s state legislative agenda for the foreseeable future. The coordination and stragegizing Project Blitz has developed is also likely…

#WeStandWithIsaac: A Movement for LGBT Inclusion in the Mennonite Church

By Scott Schomburg

…its complexity—where you’ll find Isaac preaching about fire and tears and blue birds, about life as “a fleeting education in how to love.” A wonderfully boring home page will welcome you there, and, among other things, you’ll find an archive of sermons over the years from the dozens of people who have participated in one of the more beautiful literary traditions I know—a preaching tradition based more on communal conversation than personality. So…

Bryan Fischer’s Homophobic Attacks on Romney’s Spox

By Sarah Posner

…r whether it is Fischer’s days as a spokesperson for the movement that are numbered. The Log Cabin Republicans’ Clarke Cooper compared Fischer unfavorably to George Wallace, and charged that he was going to be “left in the dustbin of history.” Kilgore: That’s probably true, given the rapidly increasing acceptance of same-sex relationships by Americans, and the generational fault lines (even among conservative evangelicals) that make it just a matt…

How Far Will White Christians Go to Maintain Power? An Interview with Robert Jones

By Peter Laarman

…a bit familiar, coming right about the time that Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The Doctrine was set up to justify Spain’s claim to the Americas, and it explicitly states that European Christians have the right to dominate and subdue any non-Christian and non-white peoples they “encounter.” It declares that they are free to conquer by any means necessary and with the full blessing of God, church, and king. And of course the idea here was that the…

Undercover at Falwell’s Liberty University, Finding Common Ground

By Nathan Schneider

…for a meeting in Providence’s new Freemason-themed hotel, I got a surprise phonecall from Father Isaac, the cassocked gentle giant who serves as Eastern Orthodox chaplain there. We hadn’t known each other well while I was a student, but I’d always liked him. Upon hearing I was in town, he thought he’d ring me up, and what followed was certainly the longest conversation we’d ever had together. He wished me well, but much more, he thanked God in a d…

Promoting Patriarchy and Fighting Pantheism, plus Adventures to the Amazon and to Space (!)

By Julie Ingersoll

…these are to be the only life choices open to women and that limiting the number of children in any way (including contraception) is a violation of God’s plan and promotion of a “culture of death.” Vision Forum begins this week with “Charting Manhood in a Lost World,” an adventure in the Amazon billed as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to muck through the Amazon like a man, with men, on a manly adventure.” (Emphasis added but, yes, that’s the a…

Deifying Pope Francis Obscures Where He’s So So Right, So So Wrong

By Daniel C. Maguire

…ries bereft of color and life?” Lord Byron exulted that the “deep and dark blue ocean” was beyond our polluting reach. He was wrong. Piles of plastic cohere in the seas like nasty little islands. The plastic grows brittle in the sun and the waves crash it into microscopic pieces that enter the food chain. We carry fish home in a plastic bag and do we then eat plastic? Clive Hamilton writes the book for our season, Requiem for a Species; “The reluc…