In spite of some suing to prevent prayers during the Inauguration and thus mixing the spiritual realm with that of the state, Obama’s transition team is engaged in an unparalleled reaching out to religious organizations in the United States. According to reports there have already been about a dozen meetings of various groups with the transition team.
Perhaps this news will lower the temperature of the controversy surrounding the President-elect’s invitation to Pastor Rick Warren to give the Invocation at his Inaugural
The run-up to Christmas, with its street-corner Salvation Army kettles and church food drives, would seem a lousy time to find out that Christian charity in America is not what it’s supposed to be. But in the recently released Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money, sociologists Christian Smith, Michael O. Emerson, and Patricia Snell argue that too many American Christians—”the most affluent single group of Christians in two thousand years of church history”—are guilty of Scrooge-like stinginess.
Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them. And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.
Ever wonder where the communion wafer most Episcopalians consume every weekend comes from? Turns out that most of them are made by a family business in Rhode Island.
‘Tis the season of Christmas and Santa Claus, it seems, is everywhere. Children anxiously await his gift-bearing arrival, but some Christians are worried that most of those children — and their parents — don’t know who “jolly old Saint Nicholas” really was.
Even among evangelicals, a branch of Protestant Christianity identified with the idea that an individual must be “born again” into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in order to be saved, nearly as many Christians said many religions can lead to eternal life (47 percent) as those who believe theirs is the one true faith (49 percent).
Updated – Integrity statement added at end President-elect Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to offer a prayer as part of his inauguration ceremonies has provoked
Richard Cizik, the Vice-President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, has been forced to resign as a result of his comments that he is “shifting” his views on same-sex marriage.
The Washington Post reports on a prayer breakfast that attracted business leaders, investors, lawyers, headhunters and other professionals. But this was not your parent’s prayer breakfast.