How do congregations make the shift from nostalgia to a new story like neighborhood? What kind of leadership is needed–by pastors and lay leaders–to move beyond the stuck places of “we’ve always done it this way” to a new way of listening for “where are we being led?”
Should black families whose ancestors suffered horribly be given land or money, grave markers and plaques or at least a public acknowledgment and apology at the cost of the descendants of the white families who abused them? What about removing statutes of limitations from legal cases filing claims to lost land?
And why did Jesus touch the leper, since the law forbade the touching of a leper? He touched him to show that “all things are clean to the clean.” Because the filth that is in one person does not adhere to others, nor does external uncleanness defile the clean of heart.
Are Americans among the most religious people in the world? The answer depends on which “world” you’re talking about. If you’re referring to the entire planet, the answer is plainly “no.”
On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity.
simply don’t see my science guided by my faith, except in as much as my life is guided by my faith. I believe it is terrible hubris to say that there must be a God because there are things that I cannot understand or that appear mystical. On the other hand, I think it is an equal display of hubris to contend that, because I can take a physiological phenomenon and apply a mathematical construct to it, there must be no God. And thusly, I am perfectly content to spend my days trying to uncover physiological mysteries while being simultaneously content spending Sundays pondering that I may never fully understand the miracle of transsubstantiation.
Eliza Linley’s Sacred Portals
Disbelief crept in on me so slowly that I did not feel any discomfort, and since then, never have a doubted for even a single second the correctness of my conclusions. And I cannot really understand, either, how anyone might want to believe that Christianity were true, because if it were, then, in the plain terms of the text, it is said that people who do not believe would be punished for eternity, and that would include my father, my brother and almost all my best friends. And that is a terrible doctrine!
When Jesus chooses to touch the leper he is not just curing him of chronic eczema or psoriasis. Nor is he simply forgiving the man’s sins, although most people who have assumed that the leper’s crawling skin was both the result and the sign of sinfulness. By stretching out his hand and touching the leper,
Jeff Sharlett: Among the dead of Continental Flight 3407 in Buffalo was a 66-year-old historian and activist named Alison Des Forges. In a short essay about the Rwandan genocide for The Revealer in 2004, I referred to Des Forges’ 1999 book on the subject, Leave None to Tell the Story, as “a painful masterwork.