Tag: Religion in America

Roman Catholic bishops have been providing guidance to their flock on political issues for ages, and for the past thirty-odd years they’ve even explicitly sounded off about various matters at stake in the voting booth. But this year, the bishops have taken it further by addressing how what voters tick on their ballot ties in with their salvation. But what those issues are may surprise you.

A recent poll of American voters indicates a distaste for, as they perceive it, candidates’ use of their faith to influence the electorate. Sixty-eight percent of respondents agreed with this statement: “Presidential candidates should not use their religion or faith to influence voters to support them.”

Revolution in Jesusland is a plea for secular and mainline progressives to understand a growing evangelical movement. The author, Zack, writes in his blog profile: “… (and we know how difficult this is to believe) there is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state.”

If you have ever seen “Jesus, save me from your followers” as a bumper sticker, then you’ve seen a symptom of a real problem. David Kinnaman’s new book (co-authored with Gabe Lyons), UnChristian, paints the picture revealing what may be the true cause of declining mainline church attendance in the 21st Century.

While the Bishops meeting in New Orleans may well be making some history of their own, we thought that a little historical perspective about the history of faith in America would be appropriate. This week was actually a fairly important week in American church history, including the adoption of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Freedom of Religion Clauses.

In an effort to help ease prison overcrowding by providing opportunities for inmates to improve their behavior and reduce recidivism, faith-based criminal justice programs are

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.” Not a single person in this gate — once the cries of confusion stopped — was apprehensive about any other person. They took to the cookies. All I felt like hugging everyone else.

As readers of The Lead are well aware, there has been a rush of best selling books challenging religion by several noted atheists. Are these books saying anythng different from atheist tracks of the past? Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield thinks that the New Atheism really is new. While atheists in the past attacked the church, these new atheists are attacking religion itself.

The headline “The Church of Baseball,” evoking a line from the Bull Durham movie, will be familiar to Daily Episcopalian readers who saw Heidi Shott’s