After months of revived debate over divorce and its increasing acceptance among Americans, a new study affirmed born again Christians are just as likely as the average American couple to divorce.
The nation has 165 seminaries, but 39 percent of seminary students attend just 20 of them. The 20 large institutions, all but two evangelical Christian, raise substantial money, have big endowments or receive moderate to high denominational support — or do all three. In the future, Mr. Aleshire said, “There may be just two kinds of seminaries, those with substantial endowments or effective annual giving and the nonexistent.”
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a new convert to the Roman Catholic Church, gave his first major speech on religion earlier this week. “For religion to be a force for good, it must be rescued not simply from extremism, faith as a means of exclusion; but also from irrelevance, an interesting part of our history but not of our future,” said Blair.
Minto, Alaska, is home to about 180 people. While it’s situated less than 80 miles northwest of Fairbank as a bird flies, it takes nearly five hours to get there by car. As Christy McKerny of the Washington Post describes, accompanying the Rev. Bessie C. Titus on the drive to visit Minto’s new worship center was a breathtaking experience.
The host of Public Radio International’s Speaking of Faith found herself on the other side of the interviewer’s mike recently, in a profile on PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. The show won a Peabody award this week, and the R&E piece took a closer look at what Krista Tippett allows might be “a ministry of listening rather than preaching”:
The Dallas Morning News Religion Blog notes an interesting new film that was previewed at the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival in Austin earlier this month, and that will air at 8 p.m. on May 29 on the Independent Film Channel. The film is called “At the Death House Door,” and it focuses on the Rev. Carroll “Bud” Pickett’s path from death-penalty supporter to opponent.
On April, 15, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI will make his first visit as Pope to the United States. Beliefnet offers complete coverage, including a blog devoted to the visit.
An evangelical group that wants to reshape the movement’s political reputation for being focused on opposing abortion and same-sex marriage is hoping that a series of meetings stressing its roots in women’s suffrage and abolition will help it break out of the mold.
Quite rightly, we may therefore say that St Paul had a view of the role of women that we now recognise to be less than Christian — to take a simple example. Once that is conceded, there is no longer any need for theologians to sweat blood ironing out the many contradictions in the Bible. Given the world as it is, those contradictions make the Bible more, not less, credible. They leave us with essential existential choices, which give meaning to the “glorious liberty of the children of God”. We are slaves to no text; nor are we a religion of any book
Some notes from around the internet/blogosphere on the special convention for San Joaquin, starting with the presiding bishop: “We stand with you in the firm and constant hope that this body will grow and flourish and bless the central valley of California in ways you have not yet dreamed of. And we will celebrate with you as that becomes reality.”