WASHINGTON — Just before last weekend’s Promise Keepers rally, a coalition of feminist groups met with news crews to issue challenges to the men massed nearby on the National Mall. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence made a very specific request. “It is essential for the leadership and membership of the Promise Keepers to speak out against all acts of family violence and sexual assault, as well as to reject attitudes that too often fuel such violence,” said spokesperson Pamela... Read more

Even critics of the Promise Keepers movement would have to concede that its leaders have shown an uncanny knack for crunching complex issues into mantras that men can chant in stadiums or, this Saturday, on the National Mall. A classic example occurred at last year’s rally for 42,000 clergy in Atlanta. The movement is built on seven promises about faith, marriage and family life. The sixth commits a Promise Keeper to reach beyond any “denominational barriers to demonstrate the power... Read more

No doubt about it, the creators of ABC’s “Nothing Sacred” knew which scenes would get the most ink. Like the premiere’s scene in which a girl confesses that she’s tempted to get an abortion and Father Ray tells her to follow her conscience. Or that night at the Valhalla Inn when he is tempted to sleep with the woman who was his lover during seminary. But the real headline grabber is Father Ray’s hip sermon bemoaning the church’s obsession with... Read more

It was another day in the Home for the Dying, a year before a 1969 British film that made Mother Teresa the most unlikely of global superstars. As was her custom, she was taking her turn doing basic chores. Over and over, the tiny nun and a coworker – an Anglican seminarian named Sathi Bunyan – lifted patients off the thin pads on narrow steel-framed cots. Fresh sheets weren’t enough. Workers also used this agonizing ritual as a chance to... Read more

Four years ago, ABC’s “NYPD Blue” started yet another fire fight between Hollywood and the cultural right. In addition to its violence and profanity, the gritty drama made headlines with a daring move in network TV – glimpses of nudity. This sent many conservatives to the barricades. Their protests led 57 stations, mostly in Bible Belt and Midwestern markets, to nix “NYPD Blue.” While conservatives celebrated their moral victory, some of these stations filled this prime-time gap with a sexy... Read more

No one gave it a second thought. Season after season, church buses and family minivans made pilgrimages down Florida’s highways to find their places outside the sanctuary called Disney World. Religious leaders often scheduled their national conventions in Orlando, knowing this would guarantee a much better turnout than gatherings in more mundane locales. Then it happened. Families and church groups began to mix with legions of homosexuals and bisexuals at the annual Gay Days festivities at the Walt Disney World... Read more

It’s hard to keep personalities out of a global debate when the names are printed in bold on letters being passed around on Capitol Hill. In this case, the key names are some of the best known in modern Christianity — evangelist Billy Graham, along with his son, Ned, and Focus on the Family leader James Dobson, along with his colleague Gary Bauer. The question: What should the United States try to do about religious persecution, especially in China? Leaders... Read more

It’s a weekday morning in Dallas and, as the office crew gathers in the coffee lounge, a staff member hands out invitations to a seminar called “Moses and Jesus Were Frauds.” A hypothetical case, but one that echoes real life. Would this be religious harassment? What if the person was plugging a revival at First Baptist? More questions: A third-generation Russian Pentecostal pastor asks an American megachurch for help. Is this an attack on Mother Russia? Or an underground Catholic... Read more

The year is 2012, as the joke goes, and two Anglo-Catholic priests in the back of National Cathedral are watching the Episcopal presiding bishop and her incense-bearing lover process down the aisle behind a statue of the Buddha, while the faithful sing a hymn to Mother Earth. “You know,” one traditionalist whispers, “ONE more thing and I’m out the door.” Yes, mainline Protestant conservatives have struggled trying to draw their doctrinal lines. After all, they may be ordered to cross... Read more

It was two or three years ago that some of the teen-sex statistics began to dip, followed by telltale ripples in mass media. Suddenly, people didn’t laugh so hard when youth minister Richard Ross and other True Love Waits leaders told kids they could find romance and intimacy through lifelong fidelity. A few people began using words like “chastity” without smirking. And the telephone calls picked up, from the likes of CNN and “Nightline,” USA Today and The New York... Read more