Faith and Politics
Several weeks ago, a pair of doves built a nest on a front windowsill at my house. My family watched as the mother bird laid two eggs, as they hatched, and as the young chicks feathered. We grew attached to the winged family who made their home with ours.
Two mornings ago, I was checking on the baby birds when a grackle (a large blackbird that a friend calls the "Darth Vader" of the bird world) swooped down and [...]
Sometimes I wish I could channel Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan. Then I'd be able to tell you why the pope was wearing bright red leather shoes.
I stood in the press corps balcony watching the popemobile flanked by black Escalades approach the John Paul II Cultural Center for Benedict XVI's interreligious meeting with faith leaders. He entered the brightly lit atrium to the [...]
I love the "construction phase" of liturgy and great ceremony. Waiting at the John Paul II Cultural Center for Pope Benedict to arrive for a meeting with interreligious leaders, I took a quick tour through some of the artwork. I was especially impressed by the wacky Warhol print of John Paul II. Also, through the atrium windows I could see a 25-yard-long brightly colored creation laid out on the floor by Guatemalan artists to welcome the pope and wish him peace. It appears to be made of [...]
No two events in this political season stand in starker contrast than last night's ABC Democratic debate and last Sunday's CNN Compassion Forum.
Rather unbelievably, ABC anchors used 50 minutes of airtime attacking Democratic candidates on tabloid issues, including a line of questioning from George Stephanopoulos lifted from right-wing pundit Sean Hannity. Almost as an afterthought, the final questions turned toward actual issues including the economy and war. The ABC Web [...]
Jim Wallis, in his book The Great Awakening said,
Imagine something called Justice Revivals in the powerful tradition of revivals past, but focusing on the great moral issues of our time. Imagine linking the tradition of Billy Graham with the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. Imagine a new generation of young people catching fire and offering their gifts, talents, and lives in a new spiritual movement for social justice. Imagine such revivals taking place in [...]
My dear friend, Ken Wilson, who pastors the Ann Arbor Vineyard, showed me a chart that I found very helpful:
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Evangelical |
Charismatic |
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Social Justice |
Liturgical |
What has happened in the last generation is that there has been border-blending among the four great movements in [...]
Last evening, I was privileged to be one of the religious leaders asked to participate in the Compassion Forum, sponsored by Faith in Public Life and broadcast by CNN from Messiah College. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama participated; Sen. John McCain declined.
The religious leaders asked questions of real substance, focusing on difficult and important policy choices. We are not so much interested in the personal testimonies [...]
Who says that Americans don't have a sense of humor? This video ad put out by the Washington, D.C., transit authority prompting the faithful to ride Metro when the Pope visits this week proves the point.
The U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference was less than pleased and asked Metro to pull the ad. My guess is the Pope would have laughed-but the Bishops apparently need additional practice in exercising their authority.
Rose [...]
Let me give you an illustration of the difference between the narrow focus of contemporary American evangelicalism and the big focus of the Bible.
D.L. Moody, the great 19th-century evangelist, described his calling and said that he essentially understood the world as being like an ocean liner that hit an iceberg. God had said to him, "Moody, it is your job to pull as many drowning people out of [...]
The children were under the bed. The girl was very nice, about 5 or 6, and the boy was interesting
Social justice is not a distraction from our commitment; it is part and parcel of the gospel of the kingdom. We read in Mark 1:15:
"The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!"
What is the message of the kingdom? Certainly the center of the message is the proclamation that through one's faith in Jesus Christ (the King), a person can be eternally saved. Thus my church regularly calls people to put [...]
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he was trying to move the country to take on the moral issue of economic injustice. And, for the first time in many years, the remembrances of King's death (this one the 40th anniversary) urged the nation to do the same. Usually the nation's anniversary celebrations freeze-frame King as the nation's greatest civil rights leader whose famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was the extent of his message. Later calls for [...]
"Must we starve our children to pay our debts?"
-- Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania
This week Congress will vote on the Jubilee Act, the most important debt legislation since 2000. I was an undergraduate theology student when the Jubilee 2000 movement made headlines, and it transformed the way I saw my faith. In [...]
The subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. has raised just outrage at the behavior of predatory lenders. It's wrong to push a mortgage which the lender knows the borrower won't be able to pay back, driving homeowners into foreclosure and bankruptcy.
But when poor nations have unpayable debt-often the result of Cold War favors to corrupt dictators-they can't declare bankruptcy. They have to just keep paying, even if all they can pay is the interest, never touching the principal. Even if [...]
I want to personally invite you to Washington, D.C., on June 13 through 16 to participate in Pentecost 2008: Training for Change. For more than a decade, we have held an annual mobilization around the time of Pentecost to lift up a vision of overcoming poverty to the nation. I believe that with your help we can make this a pivotal year of elevating poverty to the top of the national agenda, [...]
Following is an excerpt from an interview with Bob Abernethy that will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Wittenburg Door.
GARRISON: When you reflect over your years of doing Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, how would you assess the role of religion in [...]
On CNN's The Situation Room, Jim Wallis and the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins talk about evangelical attitudes in the election. Watch it:
During the closing days of January, more than 15,000 Baptists from 30 different Baptist denominations gathered together at the Convention Center in Atlanta. Although all Baptist groups were invited to join in what was called The New Baptist Covenant, official representatives from the largest Baptist group in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention, were conspicuously absent. [...]
Over the weekend, James Dobson backed off his earlier assertion that he would not cast a vote for president this year if John McCain clinched the GOP nomination. Voting is a "God-given responsibility," Dobson told host Sean Hannity Sunday night on Hannity's America, and one that he plans to [...]
Pentecostals may be the least known and most unpredictable group on the landscape.