Search for "evangelical left"

In Memoriam: Sarah Hammond

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…l Meeting just a week and a half ago. I had no idea that she had only days left to live. I prefer to think that she didn’t either. In classical antiquity, the mind was sometimes envisioned as a malleable wax tablet that could receive and store impressions of things. Sarah’s mind was a wax tablet that couldn’t not receive impressions. She couldn’t turn it off. Whether she had the energy for it or not, her mind would attempt to take in the whole wor…

New Report: Young People Leaving Church for Science

By Paul Wallace

…ry, they point to something real; “they don’t come out of nowhere.” So I’m left having to take this seriously. My background is part of why I’m so surprised. I grew up in a Baptist church in the 1970s and early 1980s. No one in authority ever mentioned evolution—or science—at all. No one ever insisted on reading Genesis literally. My dad, an engineering professor, was responsible for my attendance at church. He also strongly encouraged my childhoo…

Racing Obama

By Tamura Lomax

…importantly, who gets to decide which rendition is the most authentic? If left up to the injurious stereotypes of media culture, Obama’s “blackness” will be authenticated by his ability to gangster lean, play sports, produce children with multiple mothers, and freestyle (i.e. rap). Or equally stereotypically, and thus problematically, his inability to find a job and stay away from drugs, grills (platinum teeth), women, and bling. However, if left…

How a Group of Catholic Pacifists Took on the Nuclear State

By Eric C. Miller

…n and others as a way to continue the momentum of the Vietnam-era Catholic Left, but in a way that would be more truly faithful, riskier, and hence more efficacious. Actions are still taking place today, though far less frequently than in earlier decades. Plowshares activists in the United States have never been acquitted of the charges brought against them, which include conspiracy, sabotage, and destruction of government property. They have rece…

The Anti-Trans Hate Machine’s Conspiracies Don’t Stop at the US Border

By Annika Brockschmidt

…Science). This Network peddles reactionary talking points about allegedly “left-wing” universities and “cancel culture” while its website treats “race science” as legitimate scholarly discourse. The anti-trans movement, not just in the US, but in Europe as well, unites right-wing extremists, conservatives, and like-minded people from the political left and center behind their hatred of trans people. It’s merely the latest “wedge issue” the Right h…

The SBC Sexual Abuse Scandal is a ‘Success’ Story of the Theological Vision and Social Structure of the ‘Conservative Resurgence’

By Diana Butler Bass

…sion the heart of Southern Baptist faith. The fallout was swift. Moderates left the Southern Baptist Convention and formed a separate denomination. Trusted PBS journalist Bill Moyers called the conservatives “theological Stalinists” and former President Jimmy Carter renounced his association with the church. Carter would later explain that he left because of the SBC’s views on women: At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated…

The Problem of Church History for Opponents of Divorce

By Benjamin Dueholm

…ruel irony. The need for unwatered teaching is perhaps why reality must be left out of all such arguments. And not the reality of our own rebellious and secular age, which can never be lamented too loudly or at too great a length; that much Spaemann freely acknowledges. Rather, it is the muddy reality of our own Christian past and its key figures that must be left to one side if the teaching is to be stated with such pure, forensic clarity. Withou…

Leaving Empire: The Risks of American Insularity

By Ryann Croken

…ld from the United States Last week, Sarah Palin, a woman who has scarcely left the confines of this country, has shared the headlines with our president, the Kansan-Kenyan-black-white-Hawaiian-Indonesian-American, who has just returned from a whirlwind tour of Asia. Sarah Palin and Obama may or may not face off in 2012, but whether or not such a spectacular drama unfolds, the often-disguised clash between nationalism and cosmopolitanism will undo…

Donald Trump visits a black church. It goes about as well as you would expect.

By Daniel Schultz

…should vote for him because Republicans were the party of Lincoln. Then he left before the halfway mark to cruise around Detroit with Ben Carson. RD’s Anthea Butler argued in the pages of the Washington Post that Trump was probably getting used by Greater Faith Ministries’ Bishop Wayne T. Jackson and other prosperity gospel preachers just as much as he was using them. Maybe more. Butler started her close with this alarming kicker: It is also worth…

Fox News Needs to Get a Grip on its Affiliate’s Issues with Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…here are 45,000 Mormons in Tennessee, about .7% of the population. Mormons left the state en masse in the 1880s due to anti-Mormon violence.) “Can you name the candidate who is running for president who believes that if he is a good person, he will get his own planet?” Ferguson goaded. Five or six Memphis citizens shake their heads, chuckling, rolling their eyes. One woman darts from the camera. “It’s not Mitt Romney is it?” asks a man in a blue…