Religion Dispatches
…g, which was derided as part of the “divorce culture:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npxjuh6UyT4 Tonight, Anna described her husband to People as “someone who had gone down a wrong path and had humbled himself before God and those whom he had offended.” This week, a recap of their television show on their blog discussed how Jim Bob and Michelle “encourage their kids to take a chaperone along on all their dates so they have someone to keep them a…
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…after the university granted official recognition to an LGBT student group comprised of same-sex attracted students committed to lifelong celibacy and “spiritual friendship.” (A pre-existing LGBT student group, which affirms marriage equality, is still not acknowledged officially by Biola.) Clearly, attitudes around LGBTQ inclusion are changing rapidly in the evangelical Christian community but they’re not following a linear path toward progress….
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…d herein lies an important point. In the same address, Greear affirmed his commitment to the Bible: “I am committed to letting the Scripture, and the Scripture alone, be our rule for faith and practice. Anything else is unnecessarily divisive.” In a recent review piece for RD, I wondered aloud whether “evangelical Christianity might be irredeemably patriarchal precisely because of its biblicism.” Patriarchy and the Bible, it seems, are natural bed…
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…full name, describes connecting with others’ stories via Exvangelical as “comforting.” Despite becoming an atheist in college, she has only recently begun to sort through “the lingering effects of being raised in a fundamentalist/evangelical world,” particularly the long-term damage done by purity culture. (For this reason, Kendra found episode 10, “Emily Joy & Hannah Paasch of The Flawless Project,” “particularly poignant.”) I e-mailed Emily Joy…
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…is firsthand as an Asian-American woman who was active in Southern Baptist communities for decades, before evangelical Trump support led her to become an exvangelical. Bergeron told RD, “White supremacy holds Asians in a weird light, complimenting them on being the ‘good minority,’ while also devaluing women into sex objects who exist for their pleasure.” Describing her own experience, she recalled, “As an adult in the SBC, I saw this fetish and d…
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…oaning at a bad joke. Many of the verses have been paraphrased to maximize comedic potential so that “Jesus had disappeared in the crowd” in the Bible becomes “Houdini Jesus” on its card. Double entendres abound and there are swear words. Lots of them. This a strange mix of sincerity and sarcasm prompts the question: at what, exactly, are players supposed to laugh? PLAYERS AGES 8+ looking for interactive fun at the expense of organized religion…
Read More…omehow brings Dolly Parton into it. From the file of new studies: people become more religious during hard times and are happier during periods of difficulty, restrictions on religious belief and practice are on the rise globally, and the more educated may become more religious. “Hello, Buddhist geeks!” In the Phillipines, officials at a state-run cultural center decided that Christian symbols and phallic objects don’t mix and shut down a controve…
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…e from conception until death.’” Committed Anti-Abortion Activists Reject “Common Ground” and Common Grounders The Dominican mission’s organizers may be relatively unknown to the public, but they are part of a network of committed activists who reject any notion of “common ground.” Keith Mason’s Personhood USA describes itself as “a grassroots Christian organization founded to establish personhood efforts across America to create protection for ev…
Read More…ancis effect” from the pope’s first year. According to Daniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church…
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…on of jumper cables to start a necessary conversation.” In a recent “Guest Commentary” titled “Becoming a Christian Citizen: Electoral Lessons from the Religious Right for the Religious Left,” published in the Fall, 2008 edition of The Public Eye, a publication of Political Research Associates, Clarkson wrote: The main reason why the Religious Right became powerful is not what most people may think. Some would undoubtedly point to the powerful com…
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