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.
There are numerous articles appearing about the reactions around the world to Tuesday’s presidential election results. The Church Times in the UK has collected a number of reactions from African American leaders in the Episcopal Church and other reactions are being shared from around the world. President-elect Obama is featured on the front cover of the issue.
Andrew Brown posits that much of the acrimony in religious debate today is the result of people not taking online discourse seriously, and adds that the current schism may in fact be the result of how the Internet allows people to voice their opinions without the same filter that one generally applies to their face-to-face communications. Additionally, the same online tools that allow us to connect and see things we have in common also allow us to see what we have in opposition that we might not otherwise know.
What Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the vital center” is being slowly disenfranchised. Party “bases” become more important than their numbers justify. Passionate partisans dislike compromise and consensus. They want to demolish the other side. Whether from left or right, the danger is a tyranny of true believers. – Robert Samuelson