"Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." Read more
"Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." Read more
This is like one of those time-loop paradoxes from a time-travel sci-fi story. God intervenes to compel Loretta to pray for God to intervene to save Buck. Was someone else praying for God to "prompt" Loretta to pray? And, if so, was that person praying on their own, or were they also responding to divine prompting? How many loops and layers are at work here? Read more
I ask for help casting the movie based on televangelist Paul Crouch's FBI file. Plus: affirmative consent, advertising upselling, the Devil's advocacy, 15 yards for a Muslim Tebow, convertible grace, and subsidiarity -- it's on us. Read more
Watching Ricky Jay perform will teach you what magic tricks are supposed to look like, but no matter how closely you watch him, you won't ever learn how the trick is done. To learn that, you need to watch someone who isn't a master at the craft. The clumsier and more inept the magician, the more you'll be able to see how the trick works. That's why it can be instructive, sometimes, to check in with our old friends at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Read more
Half a point to Robert Oscar Lopez for trying to inject a bit of variety into right-wing, sky-is-falling hyperbole. Just calling everybody Hitler all the time gets a bit dull, doesn't it? Let's see more culture warriors follow his lead and branch out. Read more
The fundamentalist retreat, according to this narrative of history, meant a withdrawal from society, from politics and from public life. That retreat lasted for several decades until the post-war rise of the "Neo-evangelicals" -- a term meant to hark back to the glory days from before the great split in which evangelicals had devolved into either fundamentalists or modernists. Read more
Bebbington Schmebbington. American white evangelicals no longer identify themselves according to the kinds of religious temperaments described in David Bebbington's "quadrilateral" of biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism. That's not how the tribe defines or enforces its own boundaries. Those boundaries have become political and defiantly partisan -- anti-abortion, anti-gay, Christian nationalism, and a belief in "small government" in the Atwaterian sense of the term. Read more
Santorum's invocation of "Baptist ministers" above shows that he doesn't understand that history. And it shows that he doesn't understand what Baptists are or where they came from. Read more
"When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, 'Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?' But he turned and rebuked them." Read more
This renovation, or conversion, of a cathedral requires us to think about the way space and design serve the focus of worship. Or how they may shape the focus of worship -- how they determine what it is we think of when we think of "worship" at all. Read more
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