Witnessing inhumanity and indecency is very challenging. What people are asked to do here can lead to big questions. I’m not suggesting everyone will become an evangelical Christian but people start to ask questions and that’s a start. What all of us would prefer is a thought-through faith. This is a place where people do that for the first time.
Islam has been put in the spotlight” with consequences to the good, such as the Common Word document by Muslim scholars addressed to the Catholic Church, and to the bad, such as the “new McCarthyism” of fear and anger toward Muslims. Appleby cites new initiatives around the world in serious interfaith, interreligious dialog and collaboration.
We are god-obsessed the way a child snatched from his mother will always have his heart and flesh tuned to her, even after he forgets her face. Cover the earth with orphans and you will find grown men fashioning images of mothers and worshipping strong women and crafting myths about mothers who have left or were taken or whose spirits dwell in the trees.
Rather than discuss the merits of this decision, let’s consider this question instead: How aggressive should the Episcopal Church be in promoting itself–explicitly–as an alternative to what some of us see as the discriminatory, authoritarian aspects of Roman Catholicism?
As I read the horrifying descriptions of the time of trial in today’s passage from Mark, my mind turned to recent accounts I’ve heard from survivors of the Tsunami in Japan and of the attack upon the World Trade Center
When I began reporting on trans people and faith communities for Religion Dispatches and the Guardian, I quickly I realized just how little I knew. In an effort to educate myself, I decided to join over 1,900 trans people and allies at the 2011 Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference, the largest trans-specific health conference in the world, then celebrating its 10th anniversary.