Beliefnet Rod Dreher October 12, 2006
Orthodoxy and me
I apologize for this very long post, but it’s time to clear something up: yes, I am now a communicant of the Orthodox Church, and have been (along with my family) for a couple of months.
Religion in America
Liberal Christianity is paying for its sins
Los Angeles Times Charlotte Allen July 9, 2006
Out-of-the-mainstream beliefs about gay marriage and supposedly sexist doctrines are gutting old-line faiths.
The accelerating fragmentation of the strife-torn Episcopal Church USA, in which several parishes and even a few dioceses are opting out of the church, isn’t simply about gay bishops, the blessing of same-sex unions or the election of a woman as presiding bishop. It also is about the meltdown of liberal Christianity.
The American Biblical Tradition: The King James Version used to be our common text
Wall Street Opinion Journal Mark A Knoll Friday, July 7, 2006
In 1911 the English-speaking world paused to mark the 300th anniversary of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, with American political leaders foremost in the chorus of exaltation. To former president Theodore Roosevelt, this Bible translation was “the Magna Carta of the poor and the oppressed . . . the most democratic book in the world.” Soon-to-be president Woodrow Wilson said much the same thing: “The Bible (with its individual value of the human soul) is undoubtedly the book that has made democracy and been the source of all progress.”
Mention God? Don’t you dare
Townhall.com Ben Shapiro June 21, 2006
Brittany McComb, valedictorian of Foothill High School in Clark County, Nevada, stood up at her graduation and began to speak. A few paragraphs into her speech, school administrators cut off McComb’s microphone. She didn’t tell a dirty joke. She didn’t curse. She didn’t insult her classmates or her teachers. Brittany McComb committed the egregious sin of attempting to thank God and Jesus. “I went through four years of school at Foothill and they taught me logic and they taught me freedom of speech,” McComb stated. “God’s the biggest part of my life. Just like other valedictorians thank their parents, I wanted to thank my lord and savior.”
Strange Bedfellows: Evangelicals learn to love big government
Wall Street Opinion Journal Heather Wilhelm May 26, 2006
When Al Gore’s film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” arrived in theaters on Wednesday, it had the usual endorsements from Hollywood stars, left-leaning politicians and radical professors. But it also had a blurb from a more surprising figure: Richard Cizik, the vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals.
The New Monasticism
Christianity Today Rob Moll September 2, 2005
“How can you worship a homeless Man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” said the sign outside St. Edward’s Cathedral in Philadelphia. Inside, a group of 40 homeless families were joined by students from Eastern University to protest the eviction of women and their children from the abandoned Kensington neighborhood church. In 1996, the story was all over the news as a community activist group and a crowd of Eastern students fought the eviction by living in the church, sleeping on pews, and worshiping each Sunday. Shane Claiborne and other students left Eastern’s campus in St. Davids, drove the 20 miles into Philly, and unpacked their things in the nave.
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Campaigning from the pulpit: Why not?
USA Today Richard W. Garnett 4/16/2006
Religious leaders have long tried to sway their congregants to take sides in political battles. That might offend some, but believers, not the state, should decide when faithful activism crosses the line, says a Notre Dame law professor.
Does politics have a place in the pulpit? Should places of worship be homes for engaged and unsettling activism — or tranquil havens, sealed off from the rough-and-tumble of today’s bitter partisan debates?
Taking Back the Faith
Jacobse: Very informative article on the thinking of the religious left as they try to lift themselves out of the slough of cultural irrelevance. A bit too much blame on the “religious right” for their demise (fat in their moral complacency it was unthinkable to the “Christian” left, that a Christian can think differently than they do and still be Christian), and too eager to claim movements of moral reform as their own (Civil Rights for example), the religious left is still weak on ideas and certainly internally torn on the great moral issues of the day. I can see where this is going. It’s a grab to reclaim the “religious voice” in the culture. Dependent as they are on the political fortunes of secular left however (no real distinguishing ideas between them) it remains to be seen whether they can succeed. This will get interesting.
The Nation Dan Wakefield April 24, 2006
Until the wake-up shock of Bush II’s re-election, I was one of the great slumber party of mainline American Protestant “liberals” (as we were then still known) whose response to the outrages of those who stole our identity as Christians was the cheap and comfortable scorn and smugger-than-thou ridicule of the disengaged. My own religious-political alarm had begun to ring during the summer before the 2004 election, when I reviewed for The Nation Warren Goldstein’s biography William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience. The book brought back to me in stirring detail the work of leaders like Reverend Coffin, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Father Daniel Berrigan and their Jewish allies like Rabbi Abraham Heschel in battling racism, unjust war, nuclear proliferation, poverty and threats to civil liberties. I wrote that “their inspiring example raises a disturbing question: Where are their counterparts now?”
NCC exploits Orthodox Church
NCC PRESIDENT URGES COMMUNICATORS, TAKE ON ‘FALSE RELIGION’
New York, March 30, 2006–The president of the National Council of
Churches, the Rev. Michael Livingston, strongly urged church
communicators to, “Tell our story. By any means necessary.”
“Mainline Protestant and Orthodox churches have been pounded
into irrelevancy by the media machine of a false religion,” Livingston
said. He described what passes as religion to be, “a political
philosophy masquerading as gospel; an economic principle wrapped in
religious rhetoric and painted red, white and blue.”
And on the Eighth Day, God Went Green
New York Times JOHN TIERNEY February 11, 2006
And on the eighth day, God said, Let there be a thermostat for the heavens and the earth, and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let no man adjust it more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius, until the end of time.
Now that evangelical Christians have joined the battle against global warming, we may as well acknowledge that America has one truly national religion: environmentalism.
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