Tag: Religion in America

Richard Sloan, writing an op-ed column in today’s LA Times, waxes trenchant over the California Supreme Court ruling earlier this week that it was discriminatory for a medical group to refuse a woman treatment for her inability to get pregnant. At issue wasn’t the artificial insemination procedure itself, but rather the fact that the woman in question is a lesbian. Sloan reminds readers that “Freedom of religion is a cherished value in American society. So is the right to be free of religious domination by others,”

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.

Joel Hunter, a major voice in the evangelical movement in the United States has agreed to offer up the closing prayer at the Democratic convention. He’s doing this, in part because, in his mind, Obama is the most pro-life candidate running for president this year.

A former pastor and former meteorologist is working to drum up interest in a nation-wide effort to pray to God to let rain fall on

Political Research Associates (PRA) has launched an investigation into right-wing efforts to destabilize mainline Protestant denominations and their LGBT rights programs and policies with the hiring of Project Director Kapya John Kaoma.

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.

The demographic makeup of the evangelical movement within American christendom is changing. The driver of this change appears to be the assimilation into evangelicalism of large numbers of immigrants from around the world. Their presence is effecting the way evangelicals as whole view the relationship between Church and State, but it’s also serving to reinforce many of the existing social views of present evangelicalism.

Peter Steinfels has a provocative column in the New York Times that discusses the importance of doubt to our modern faith. The question he raises is this: is our doubt a transition to a life without faith? Or is modern faith simply more comfortable with doubt? While inconclusive, the data seems to point to the first option.

Imagine, if you will, says Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, the furor that might arise if a president decided to re-edit the Bible to suit his own beliefs. That is exactly what Thomas Jefferson did: excising the miracles and inconsistencies he found within the four gospels and pasting the rest of Jesus’ “ethical teachings” into a single narrative.

Grace Cathedral in San Francisco is one of the sites this summer of the “Jesus for President” tour. The event starts at Grace Friday next