Tag: Religion in America

Last year a Pew Research study of American opinions on support for same-sex showed that 37% were in favor of legal marriage recognition and 54% were opposed. But that study was significant because it showed movement from the year prior. This year a similar study shows that the movement is moving toward a broad majority acceptance of same-sex marriage with now 42% in favor and 48% opposed.

95% of Americans believe in God. But they don’t agree on what that God is like.

The first two weekends in October have been traditionally the time when Episcopal parishes hold their annual “Blessing of the Animals” as a particular way of marking the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Generally that involves blessing people and their pets and praying for many happy years together. But what sort of support does the Church have for people who are grieving the loss of their animal companions?

America can still be, as Madison perceived the nation in 1785, “an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion.” But recognizing that deep religious discord has been part of America’s social DNA is a healthy and necessary step. When we acknowledge that dark past, perhaps the nation will return to that “promised…lustre” of which Madison so grandiloquently wrote.

Someone passing through teaches generally about social needs … but because there is no immediate reference this stuff tends not to have an impact, and tends not to be good teaching as a whole, and then we tend to do nothing about the culture as whole. When Micah says, ‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love mercy,’ do you have any specific reference about what the justice needs are in your community?

The gap that could squander our democracy isn’t the gap between liberal and conservative, or labor and management, or progressive and fundamentalist, or Christianity and Islam. It is the gap that troubled Jesus: the gap between a rich man who lived fabulously and a poor man.

A Baptist congregation in Texas has separated itself from their state’s conference because the local church welcomes gay and lesbians contrary to the policy of their denomination.

Hauerwas discusses his new memoir and explains why he thinks “We’re all congregationalists now.”

Historical comparisons are bound to be inexact; but American Muslims, like American Catholics, are now building their own religious and cultural institutions, and they are seeking guidance from a wide variety of religious sources—some few from jihadists, most from accommodationists.

Geocentrism, or the idea that the Earth does not move, and is the center of the created Universe featured as the center point of the