Religion Dispatches
With apologies to Reza Aslan, he is not an unbiased scholar of the historical Jesus, or of the history of Islam, or of any other phenomenon in the study of religion. Nor is any Christian or Jewish scholar, or any liberal or conservative scholar. I just wish he had said so.
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A viral CNN post by Rachel Held Evans argues that millennials are fed up with the church’s reactionary politics and just want Jesus, while Brett McCracken counters in the Washington Post that were they to listen to their elders they’d break out of their twitter-obsessed world and find meaning. But what if it’s not authentic faith they’re looking for at all?
Read MoreIn which the author of a new Jesus bio repeatedly addresses his Muslim background.
Read MoreWelcome to the greatest story never sold.
Read MoreGuys, the video mocks Tarantino, not… forget it.
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What McLaren is after is a Christian faith that is not automatically hostile to other faiths and to no faith: he calls this “strong-benevolent” Christianity, observing along the way that only active peacemakers can really claim to be connected to God with any real degree of credibility—a point that should be obvious but isn’t.
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The day after it was announced that Louie Giglio, an Atlanta pastor, founder of the Passion movement and campaigner against human trafficking, had been chosen to deliver the benediction at President Obama’s second inauguration, an old sermon of his surfaced. OK, it didn’t…
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Pundits fume, but the images of Obama as Jesus are out there. And they mean something.
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The questions that will stir again among my graduate students, and I suspect among many churchgoers generally, will likely not have much to do with the authenticity of the fragment and what it may or may not, in itself, say about the marital status of Jesus or the leadership status of women. Rather, they will be asking again to what exactly—if the Church continues to disregard the evidence of history and the voices of the faithful in engaging the world as it is and as it can be—are its current leaders listening?
Read MoreEven if Jesus were married, he would still be very different from us.
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