“Sometimes, we need to make accommodations so they can be part of the community,” he says. At a recent service, a woman walked to the front of the church and took the microphone. “She can’t talk well and she stumbles, but she thanked everyone for praying for her brother,” Beck says. Sometimes he must remind her not to put her fingers in the common Communion cup.
LaHaye and Jenkins take a literal interpretation of prophecies found in the Book of Revelation. They believe the antichrist will surface on the world stage at some point, but neither see Obama in that role. “I’ve gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the antichrist,” says novelist Jenkins. “I tell everyone that I don’t think the antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics.”
This passage from Matthew describes one of those difficult moments in Jesus’ life that we might skip altogether if the lectionary did not direct us to deal with it. What makes it so difficult is how harsh Jesus sounds, how harsh and downright rude. . . .
So much focus on striving to win always leaves me uneasy. If the last shall be first, I find myself wondering, how do you defend years of training to go for the gold? Most of us know what it means to want to be the best at school or in the office, or to get our way in relationships. These yearnings don’t generally bring out our most loving or generous selves.
Researchers are hosting a conference at Ohio State University in which they are announcing that they have shed more light on—or shrouded further in mystery, if you’ll pardon the pun—the possible authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. Carbon dating authorized by the Roman Catholic church in 1998 established it, for many, to be medieval in origin. New research, however, suggests that the shroud may have been vandalized and/or patched during medieval times, introducing cotton fibers that are not part of the original.
It’s a trend that we’ve noted previously as we’ve followed nonconservative evangelical groups and seen reports of this through the Pew Forum, but the Washington Post gave over part of its front page yesterday to put a new face on the changing landscape both for evangelicals and the Republican Party—that of Jonathan Merritt, 25, a Baptist preacher’s son who explains in an interview how he personally has experienced that change.
Andrew Brown posits that much of the acrimony in religious debate today is the result of people not taking online discourse seriously, and adds that the current schism may in fact be the result of how the Internet allows people to voice their opinions without the same filter that one generally applies to their face-to-face communications. Additionally, the same online tools that allow us to connect and see things we have in common also allow us to see what we have in opposition that we might not otherwise know.
’80s nostalgia is everywhere these days, but one American Baptist preacher has taken it to another level. Tripp Hudgins, the 37-year-old pastor of the Community Church of Wilmette near Chicago, was looking for a way to help boost summer attendance. So he created a sermon series in which he discusses about the spiritual themes that are woven into the films of John Hughes.
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Both men have proved to be geniuses at adapting religion to their times. Mr Graham took the barbed-wire fundamentalism of his youth and reshaped it for the post-war era of two-car garages and upward mobility. Mr Warren took post-war evangelicalism and reshaped it, yet again, for the world of suburban anomie and the search for meaning. This required entrepreneurial skills of a high order.