A leading evangelical voice for nuclear disarmament criticized politicians for comparing a widely debated nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran to the Holocaust and saying it fulfills End Times prophecy in the Bible.
Source: Baptist News Global | Bob Allen
Source: Religion News Service
A new collection from RNS blogger David Gushee, along with Isaac Sharp, explores the different roles that scholars and popular figures have played in forming evangelicals’ understandings of Christian ethics.
Source: Religion in American History | Michael Limberg
Wallis’s post on the Iran Deal is a reminder that further work remains to be done in investigating the full richness of progressive evangelicals’ engagement with the world.
Source: Fitchburg Star | Jacob Bielanski
Orion is not your typical teenager.
The 15-year-old student at Madison West studies Latin and is interested in the field of acoustical levitation – the science of using sound waves to suspend and move objects. He claims to be a “huge” Dr. Who fan, though he admits he hasn’t seen many episodes prior to the 2005 reboot.
And Orion – whose last name the Fitchburg Star is withholding at the family’s request – was born with the name “Molly.”
In April of this year, he revealed his new identity to his church congregation at Memorial United Church of Christ, following his announcement that the church would be holding a workshop on the matter. When “Molly” told those gathered that the event was important to him because he wanted to be called Orion and henceforth referred to as “he,” the announcement was met with wide applause, according to pastor Phil Haslanger.
Source: South Jersey Courier-Post | Kim Mulford
The day Michael Brown died in a residential neighborhood last August changed everything for Leah Gunning Francis.
Source: Block Island Times | Lars Trodson
Wallis, who will be speaking this Sunday, Aug. 16, at the Harbor Church at 10 a.m., has done everything from walkside by side with Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu, to getting thrown in jail to, most recently, organizing peaceful protests on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. What has motivated him, since being a teenager in Detroit, is a powerful sense of racial equality and social justice. As American streets were the scenes of rioting and unrest45 or 50 years ago, so are some of them again today, borne out of issues that seem to rise and fall at any given time.
Source: Patheos | Suzanne Ross
Sojourners offers clear-eyed support for the deal as “better than the alternatives” and clearly better than military strikes which “would be, at best, premature, as well as highly unpredictable and morally irresponsible in creating yet another U.S. war with a Muslim country.”
Source: Relevant | Lisa Sharon Harper
Today, the real killer is the unconscious biases that shape the course of every day: Where we live, where we work, where we send our kids to school, who we dream of our children marrying, and where we worship.
Source: Huffington Post | Charles Redfern
"No longer a simply political or even a scientific issue, climate change is now a moral imperative that the church must respond to."
Source: Urban Milwaukee
"No longer simply a political or even a scientific issue, climate change is now a moral imperative that the church must respond to"
Source: Huffington Post | Lisa Sharon Harper
May God help us all to enter the one year commemoration of Michael Brown's death and the uprising in Ferguson, MO by reflecting on how we responded to God's question a year ago: "Ask what I should give you in the face of black death?"
Source: Patheos | Kyle Roberts
As a satirist, he has played something of the role of the prophet. Whether Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, or Jon Stewart, satirists help the rest of us give voice to the craziness. And sometimes that’s all we need.
Source: Poughkeepsie Journal | Bill Decker
We have supported this endless war for the past half century; most recently, the Iraq-Afghanistan wars costing more than 8,000 lives of our soldiers, nobody knows how many civilian lives in those two countries, thousands of disabled veterans, and about $3 trillion. Why not try another tack when the one we have chosen has battered our nation so brutally?
Source: Relevant | Jesse Carey
We recently spoke with Lisa Sharon Harper, Chief Church Engagement Officer and columnist at Sojourners and one of the authors of Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith, about the string of police shootings, how our society can hold authority figures more responsible and how the evangelical church can help usher in change and racial reconciliation.
Source: Seacoast Online | Robert Azzi
Today, I find something profoundly un-American happening in Washington, something profoundly unsettling about the tone taken by opponents of the agreement negotiated between the P5+1 and Iran.
“He was impregnably armoured," Graham Greene wrote of Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, "by his good intentions and his ignorance."
Source: Christian Post | Tony Magliano
We can either choose to rationalize and condone violence and war, or we can help God build his kingdom of life and love. In the biblical book of Deuteronomy, the author lays out a divine ultimatum for humanity: "I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord, your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him."
May we always choose life!
Source: Huffington Post | Jim Wallis
There's a new kind of language being used around the Iran nuclear deal recently negotiated in Vienna. We can call it "Trump Talk," defined as a drumbeat of outrageous political speech that is historically inaccurate, intellectually dishonest and even deceptive, morally and spiritually offensive and willfully tone deaf.
If politicians are letting one person trump the tone of politics, just to go up in the polls or get on the debate stage, that's very bad news for our nation's civil discourse.
It certainly isn't serious talk. Serious talk is "Hard work." "Difficult negotiations." "Competing interests." "Coalitions and diplomacy." Serious talk recognizes that no agreement, no matter how diligently negotiated, is perfect.
Source: Catholic News Service | Daniel O'Shea
Seven presidential candidates have responded to a call from anti-poverty advocates by submitting brief videos outlining their plans to address poverty.
The videos, delivered to an umbrella organization known as the Circle of Protection that includes the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, were made public July 21 by representatives of the group.
Source: National Catholic Reporter | Michael Sean Winters
Saturday, there was a conference, well, not exactly a conference, at the Chicago Theological Seminary titled, “Women in the Catholic Church: What Francis Needs to Know.” Conferences have a certain academic flavor. This event had all the theological sophistication of a high school pep rally. You can find the on-demand video of the event here.
One panel especially caught my attention: “Sex, Sexuality and Other Unmentionables.” I do not know about anyone else, but it seems to me that way too much time within the Catholic community has been spent discussing sex and sexuality. The subject is anything but unmentionable. There is a veritable tsunami of articles and books on the topic. But, as predicted in these pages shortly after the election of Pope Francis, this panel demonstrated the divide within the Catholic Left that Francis has made obvious, between those of us who care primarily about the poor and the marginalized and those who care mostly about pelvic theological issues. The event at CTS was a kind of political convention for the latter group.
Source: Christian Post | Stoyan Zaimov
Former President Jimmy Carter has said in an interview that he does not believe Jesus Christ would support abortion in most cases, identifying the "only conflict" he's had between his political duties and Christian faith. "I have never believed that Jesus would be in favor of abortion, unless it was the result of rape or incest, or the mother's life was in danger. That's been the only conflict I've had in my career between political duties and Christian faith," Carter told The New York Times in an interview posted on Friday.