The conservative Alliance Defense Fund is organizing pastors to directly endorse political candidates by name from the pulpits on September 28. The want to provoke the IRS into investigating them so they can sue the agency. Their goal is to remove the ban on direct political activity in churches.
The On Faith blog at the Washington Post posed this question to a panel of fifty religious leaders: “Women are not allowed to become clergy in many conservative religious groups. Is it hypocritical to think that a woman can lead a nation and not a congregation?”
Some Christians who are thinking about how God might want them to eat in light of new research on health, working conditions in food supply chains and environmental crises.
As currently practiced, the institution is a hodgepodge of biblical, classical, courtly and Christian rules and mores. What we know as “marriage” is rooted in warring historical efforts at regulating procreation; tamping down sexual lust (especially female lust); and — only relatively recently — celebrating companionship and romantic love. Those of us who speak reverently about the sanctity of marriage must also acknowledge that modern matrimony is less a sacred vessel than a crazy quilt.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has accused the Anglican church of allowing its “obsession” with homosexuality to come before real action on world poverty. “God is weeping” to see such a focus on sexuality and the Church is “quite rightly” seen by many as irrelevant on the issue of poverty, he said.
While Barack Obama has struggled to capture Jewish votes, it turns out that one of his wife’s cousins is the country’s most prominent black rabbi.
Joseph Wright (Penn State University) and Michael Bailey’s (Georgetown University) examined the dramatic drop in abortions in the 1990s. The results are significant. States that spend more generously on nutritional supplement programs, for example, could see up to 37 percent lower abortion rates. Other factors such as cutting welfare more slowly and higher male employment rates had a 20 to 29 percent reduction rate.
Earlier this year, the newswires ran amok with report after report that McCain was no longer an Episcopalian, but a Baptist. But that splits more hairs than some are comfortable with. In the meantime, Palin is so closely tied with Pentecostalism that some question how nondenominationally evangelical she is.
Riazat Butt, religion correspondent for the Guardian, wrote a column for the Church Times, reprinted today at Thinking Anglicans, in which she requests that people honor her Ramadan-season request with “by refraining from publishing stories about gay bishops during the hours of sunrise and sunset.”
Eileen Guenther, the newest president of the American Guild of Organists, gets spotlighted in a Religion News Service interview this week. Facing declining membership, Guenther explains that organs haven’t so much been replaced as the instrument of choice in churches as they have been supplemented by other instruments. The result is a new landscape for church musicians, one that she hopes the guild can help them face.