The Archive

Author: Episcopal Cafe

New evidence on the Shroud of Turin

August 16, 2008 No Comments

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.

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GOP can’t bank on evangelicals anymore

August 16, 2008 No Comments

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.

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Religious discussion in an age of incivility

August 16, 2008 No Comments

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.

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Don’t You Forget About …

August 16, 2008 1 Comment

’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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The next Billy Graham

August 16, 2008 1 Comment

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.

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How not to preach the parables

August 10, 2008 3 Comments

It’s a curious thing that pastors often find it so difficult to preach Jesus’ parables. In truth, the only hard thing about the parables is that they are so simple, so straightforward in what they claim and what they demand. They are so simple that we need to make them difficult in order to escape the piercing gaze of Jesus. Or perhaps some pastors feel they need to soften the parables in order to protect the congregation from God.

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How would you spend $10 billion?

August 10, 2008 3 Comments

If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity? This is a small amount compared to rich-government budgets. But if we could set aside an extra $10 billion, we could achieve an awful lot.

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The most segregated hour

August 10, 2008 4 Comments

Americans may be poised to nominate a black man to run for president, but it’s segregation as usual in U.S. churches, according to the scholars. Only about 5 percent of the nation’s churches are racially integrated, and half of them are in the process of becoming all-black or all-white, says Curtiss Paul DeYoung, co-author of “United by Faith,” a book that examines interracial churches in the United States.

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Presidential candidates on faith

August 10, 2008 1 Comment

Time let John McCain and Barack Obama to describe their faith. Each used the opportunity to offer a very different take of the issue of the importance of faith in their lives.

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Chinese Religiosities

August 9, 2008 No Comments

With the Olympics going on, much attention is gathering around the China’s policies on religion. Speaking of Faith took a look at China and its religious identity crisis of sorts a couple of weeks ago when Krista Tippett talked to professor and documentary director Mayfair Yang: “Put the words “religion” and “China” in a sentence together, and Western imaginations may go to indifference at best, to brutal repression at worst. Yet in grand historical perspective, China is a crucible of religious and philosophical thought and practice. Anthropologist and filmmaker Mayfair Yang says that the upheavals of the 20th century created an amnesia — in the West as in China itself — about this rich, pluralistic spiritual inheritance.”

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