Faith and Politics
The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom
The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
I do enough heavy reading professionally - when I read for pleasure, I'm looking for a good novel, or very entertaining non-fiction. These five are guaranteed beach, holiday, or plane reading:
My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, [...]
Fed up with the so-called "War on Christmas" craziness? One of our readers decided to fight back - with poetry:
'Twas the month before Christmas; with anticipation,
I'd prayed to be peaceful, I'd felt adoration.
The Good News was soon to be shouted out loud.
The Wonder, the Joy, would dispel every cloud.
The [...]
Fed up with the so-called "War on Christmas" craziness? One of our readers decided to fight back - with poetry:
'Twas the month before Christmas; with anticipation,
I'd prayed to be peaceful, I'd felt adoration.
The Good News was soon to be shouted out loud.
The Wonder, the Joy, would dispel every cloud.
The [...]
The Things they Carried, by Tim O'Brien
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Things they Carried, by Tim O'Brien
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"It is unconscionable that Bethlehem should be allowed to die slowly from strangulation."
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu
When we hear about Bethlehem this Christmas season, what do we imagine? A town far away and frozen in time? Or security [...]
We've all heard the tired sermon cliches about the real meaning of Christmas being overshadowed by the materialism and commercialism of holiday shopping. Blah Blah Blah. Well, here's another layer of crass holiday exploitation for you: The very people claiming to be putting the "Christ" back in "Christmas" are cashing in big time on buttons, magnets, and bumper stickers. Take a deep breath, and then exhale a long exasperated sigh with me as you read this
Beliefnet asked God's Politics to dialogue with a recent post by one of their Virtual Talmud bloggers, Rabbi Eliyahu Stern, which compared Jimmy Carter with Orthodox Jews who attended Iran's Holocaust deniers summit:
While [...]
Two months ago, we helped convene a group of 24 evangelical Christian leaders to launch an Evangelicals for Darfur campaign. Full-page ads ran in several national and many local newspapers around the country, along with radio ads. [...]
Red Letter Christian Richard Rohr was featured in today's NPR segment, This I Believe. Here's a choice nugget, but you can also read or listen to his entire reflection.
[M] any religious folks insist on [...]
Jim Wallis joins Anderson Cooper along with Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Rev. Dwight Hopkins, American Baptist minister and professor at University of Chicago Divinity School, as part of a focus on "What Is a Christian: Where Do You Fit?"
I know this is a "God's Politics" blog, and I know that this won't sound very political, but in the end, it sort of is, especially ten days before Christmas.
Earlier this week, I was speaking to a group of Methodist ministers and we sang the Christmas carol "Joy to the World." Two [...]
I spent much of the summer of 2006 visiting seven countries in Latin America with theologian Rene Padilla (integral-mission.org). Among the highlights of the trip was my time in Honduras, including a stay with Kurt Ver Beek and his beautiful [...]
Last week, I participated in a Washington Post real-time online chat about divisions in the Episcopal Church around issues of church politics, sexual identity, and biblical [...]
Norman Kember, Harmeet Singh Sooden, and James Loney, the three Christian Peacemaker Team members held by Iraqi militants for 118 days last year have responded to the arrest and trial of their captors much in the way anyone familiar with their organization would expect - with unconditional forgiveness and an unequivocal condemnation of violence as a means of justice.
Below are a few excerpts [...]
The animus between the traditional (complementarian) and the egalitarian views of women's roles shows little signs of abating. The polarized positions on issues such as whether a woman should submit to her husband, whether she is allowed to preach, or indeed, whether she is permitted to do anything without male permission, is a polemic that has its vociferous spokespersons on both sides.
With an evangelical zeal, I hold to the equality of men and women in [...]
For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, Stratfor is a highly unfluential consulting firm known in some circles as the "shadow CIA." At the very least, they're anything but apologists for progressive Christianity. But here's their most recent analysis, which I share, because frankly, it backs up my post from [...]
On Friday, I wrote about the invitation from Sen. Harry Reid to speak on the Democrat's weekly radio address and the difficult decision it presented. I said that I [...]