Search for "evangelical left"

Secularist Activists Are Being Murdered in Bangladesh: An Ongoing Crisis Causes Many to Flee

By Michael De Dora

…alongside several writers when extremists broke in wielding machetes. They left Tutul and the writers to die. One of the writers, Ranadipam Basu, was able to reach his mobile phone and post about the attack on Facebook, prompting police to respond and help those attacked to the hospital. They would all survive, though with injuries of varying severity. Sadly, another publisher wounded in a connected attack later that day, Faisal Arefin Deepan, wou…

Painting Elephants

By Bruce Prescott

…te House. Three years later, Land was the leading apologist among American evangelicals who defended war with Iraq as a “just war.” In 1990 moderate and progressive Baptists left the SBC and formed a new organization called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. One of their first tasks was to raise the funds necessary to sustain the Baptist Joint Committee with its mission to preserve the historic Baptist legacy as advocates for separation of church…

The Next Islamists: The Wide Green Smudge That’s Changing Our World

By Haroon Moghul

…olitical movements, many of which inherited or seized the discourse of the left and rebranded it (June 12, 1967: a great time to reintroduce an old product), and pietist movements concerned with the propagation of “orthodox” Muslim practices. The pietism fed into and was fueled by Islamist politics, but ultimately the politics expanded because it claimed to defend the piety. I believe the convergence of three realities has produced the Next Islami…

Battlestar Galactica and the Future of American Religion

By Nick Street

…of Salvation,” an episode that aired in November 2006. The story: A beacon left behind 3,000 years ago by human colonists in search of Earth is discovered by a Cylon base ship. Turns out that the Cylons have no resistance to a virus that has been lingering in the beacon’s innards, and all the biomechanical creatures on the ship—robotic centurions and raiders as well as humanoid “skin jobs”—succumb to the bug. After the rest of the Cylon fleet real…

Carter, Gore, and the New Baptist Covenant

By Bruce Prescott

…te House. Three years later, Land was the leading apologist among American evangelicals who defended war with Iraq as a “just war.” In 1990, moderate and progressive Baptists left the SBC and formed a new organization called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. One of their first tasks was to raise the funds necessary to sustain the Baptist Joint Committee with its mission to preserve the historic Baptist legacy as advocates for separation of churc…

A New Book By Esteemed Sociologist Robert Wuthnow Struggles to Show ‘Why Religion is Good for American Democracy’

By Peter Laarman

…s of dark money that so obviously, to me at least, deeply undermine what’s left of American democracy. And why were so many religious conservatives sufficiently interested in fiscal policy to rally behind the Tea Party? To Wuthnow this is “puzzling,” because “it should have been in the interest of religious leaders whose congregations were helping people whose homes were being foreclosed and whose jobs were being lost…to support the government’s e…

Presbyterians, Change Hearts & Minds, Begin Ordaining Gays

By MaryAnn McKibben Dana

…this the year? Some speculate that enough conservative congregations have left the denomination to help swing the vote. But advocates downplay the impact of their departure, since most reports estimate that only 100 of the denomination’s 11,000 congregations have been lost. “I don’t buy it,” says Dykers-Koenig. “Maybe in a couple of presbyteries [it made a difference].” Rev. Teri Peterson, a pastor who helped organize the pro-10A response in nort…

To Let It Go and So To Find A Way: U2, (A)Live with Grief and Grace

By Cathleen Falsani

…he years have been written to fill a void, an absence, a hole in the heart left by a loved one,” Bono continued, before launching into “Iris,” a heart wrenchingly personal song about the mother he lost when he was just 14 years old. “This next one is one of those. It’s for my mother, Iris, who taught me that through the wound, that this kind of thing can be, there’s an opening to something fantastic.” Bono, guitarist The Edge, drummer Larry Mullen…

Of God, But Not God: A Methodist Minister Speaks About Church’s Refusal to Open Its Doors to LGBT

By Joel Pitney

…me? Definitely. But my gender has always been an issue. People have always left the churches where I’ve served because I’m a woman. The reality is that I’ve had to be better at my job than my male counterparts. I’ve had to work harder. I’ve been willing to do that. And I have for the most part enjoyed my 40 years of ministry. It’s great to hear about your history with gender issues in the church. I think it lays a good foundation for exploring you…

A Love Letter to #Exvangelicals and Those Deconstructing Their Toxic Faith

By Andrew L. Seidel

…is a threat to that system. People stuck in the system can see that you’ve left and are happy—perhaps happier. And that is threatening. That’s why we see so many snide comments from religious leaders chastising deconstructionists (I won’t link to them here, in my love letter, but they’re not hard to find. I’m not out to court controversy, but to offer support). “Faith over fear” is a phrase we hear a lot these days. But how can a faith be strong i…