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YOU Are Spiritual But Not Religious: The Secret Spiritual History of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books

By Daniel Silliman

…at happens in this story!” The first book sold 8,000 copies, an impressive number for an independent press. The series was then bought up by Bantam Books and re-branded Choose Your Own Adventure in 1980. An initial marketing push gave 100,000 copies of The Cave of Time to librarians, who loved the concept and the effect it had of getting kids to actually sit down and read. Selling for $2.95 apiece, more than 50 titles were published over the next…

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…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…e priorities of old-fashioned evangelism—where a premium was placed on the number of souls that were “saved”—have been supplanted in recent years by those of the social gospel, in which Christian ethics are applied to societal issues such as poverty, violence, preventable disease, ecological concerns, gender issues, and human rights. “More and more you are beginning to see people seeing the social aspect of the Gospel, where Jesus himself went out…

Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

By Amina Wadud

…sque is gigantic, full of beautiful and elaborate designs, with an immense number of repetitions to them. The stairs and the escalators are deceiving, taking two for each floor in one tower and only one escalator per floor in another tower. I never did figure out which was which. I knew the fastest way up to the third floor from my hotel, but this was always early and therefore less chaotic. It also involved a wide ramp straight from the outer fro…

Are You Rapture Ready?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…of a Broadway show. Jesus is about to make his big entrance only his final number will feature the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tom Evans, spokesman for Family Radio said their math for setting the return date came from a verse in Luke 17: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” According to Camping’s prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about…

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

…. Simply identifying as an atheist at first felt uncomfortable to me for a number of reasons. All of my family members remained Christian, so it was easier for me to tell them that I was “searching,” or at least agnostic, rather than atheist. Additionally, I wasn’t sure that the label applied to me. Finally, now, as a historian of religion, when I introduce myself to strangers, they inevitably ask me about my religious commitments. When I explain…

What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

By John Stoehr

…commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection; the disproportionate number of Covid deaths in states run by Republican governors; this week’s shooting massacre in San Jose, Calif., and every other one like it; and, let’s see, what else? Well, feel free at the end of this piece to add your own examples. There are plenty more. All have in common the political concept that God divided the world between the elected and the unelected, that is, b…

Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ment. There is a widespread feeling that, despite impressive growth in the numbers and capacities of organizations promoting queer/LGBTIA+ issues, there has been little impact on the everyday lives of African queer/LGBTIA+ individuals and communities. Discriminatory laws and policies remain stubbornly in place in almost all countries, and the hostile public perceptions of queer/LGBTIA+ identities that sustain these laws and policies seem as pervas…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…itutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a reference to…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…s copies of the book have sold for the past half century and it was ranked number 9 in the “Top 50 Books the Have Shaped Evangelicals” by Christianity Today, alongside works by C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Francis Schaffer, and Rick Warren. Her influence is well noted in her obituary by Kate Shellnutt at Christianity Today. Through Elliot’s book, evangelicals latched on to the deaths of these five young men, and their story became a galvanizin…