Domestic violence no a reason for divorce after all, it seems.
Religious Connections says Saddleback Teaching Pastor Tom Holladay told his parishioners that in the audio clip which created the ruckus, he never intended to say that the Bible does not permit a woman to divorce a spouse [...]
Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is a global-cooling coal man.
Coal Land has linked up with Friends of Coal to bang his drum against greenhouse gas emission control and to bless coal-fired' [...]
Yes, I overlooked it (not a Leno fan).
No, I cannot/will not let President Obama's offhand diminution of Special Olympians pass. Or accept a staff-delivered apology as sufficient.
Not because I have children or grandchildren who are Special Olympians.
I don't. Not even close. Nor' [...]
Love E-Voting? Read Brad Friedman on the indictment of Clay County, Ky., officials for "chang[ing] votes at the voting machine" and showing others how.
The vulnerable machines are deployed in:
. . . 419 jurisdictions in 18 states including Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New [...]
Two nationwide polls show the French losing confidence in Pope Benedict XVI, and one of them found an overwhelming majority of French Catholics in favor of a change in abortion/contraception doctrine.
[...]
Hughes with his mother, Sylvia Plath not long before her death.
Nicholas Hughes is gone, by his own hand, leaving us behind to wonder what we might have done.
Almost inevitably in this stigmatizing culture [.pdf], [...]
Was Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, speaking ex-cathedra?
Apparently unmoved by the Bush administration's history of manipulating conservative Christians like him, Dr. Land told the Houston Chronicle:
I don't think there's any question that the vast majority of Southern Baptists [...]In matters of imprisonment, the relationship between education, employment and recidivism is well known to social scientists. To legislators and the rest of us, often not so well.
What we learn from the example of Austria's handling of the criminal of the century is that whatever ultimately happens to
Is poor Sarah now broke along with the rest of us? How did January's $11-million book deal become March's legal defense fund (both still prospective)?
Ten "frivolous" (she calls them) ethics complaints down the road from her national political debut and, says the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska's "Gov." [...]
U.S. Army Brig. General Gary S. Patton and Gen. Carter Ham are attacking the historic military prejudice against acknowledging and seeking treatment for psychiatric illness by sharing their experience with PTSD.
For Patton it was the memory of a soldier who died before his eyes in Iraq and for [...]
Our first black president-elect, whose campaign was fraught with both false and real issues of religion, has created for his inauguration a faith collage of the culture wars which have racked the nation for four decades.
Together, the voices he has chosen to pray and preach compose the elements [...]
Associated Baptist Press reignited a fire Thursday when it reported:
Rick Warren, the Southern Baptist megachurch pastor chosen to offer the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration, says the Bible does not permit a woman to divorce a spouse who is abusing her.
"That means in essence that Warren [...]
Saddleback Church's evangelical pastor Rick Warren is not a "bigot."
No, as Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School explains in his current Sightings column, Warren is a theocrat who proclaims that "five issues that are non-negotiable. To me, they're not even debatable because [...]
Southern Baptist Pastor Wade Burleson suggests that an unduly privileged International Mission Board (IMB) trustees oversee publication of inflated, sometimes fabricated statistics of missionary accomplishment.
The IMB, which has missionary operations in virtually every country in the world other than the U.S. and Canada, is not new to controversy. IMB [...]
A young child's unbearable, inescapable suffering creates Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
To survive, the child separates the pain into different personalities, usually each with separate memories.
DID's origin in almost inexpressible pain makes Showtime's dark comedy United States of Tara something of a paradox.
How can civilized people laugh at the [...]
Showtime's United States of Tara is written by Academy Award winner Diablo Cody.
The dark-comic show's central character is Tara.
Tara suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and when stressed cycles with comic effect between her four personalities.
The following video lyrically and with disturbing illustrative images explains DID's [...]
Tara of Showtime's dark-comic United States of Tara has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and when stressed, cycles rapidly between her four, vocal personalities.
Screenwriter Diablo Cody plans to live-tweet her show, when it debuts on Jan. 18, and that's both a brilliant innovation and one the show [...]
Premarital teenage virginity pledges don't delay premarital sex and do result in more unsafe sex, concluded a large, well-designed study by Janet E. Rosenbaum at the Johns Hopkins School Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Earlier, nonpartisan studies of abstinence-only sex education similarly concluded that it doesn't [...]
Sunday with predictable effects, pastor Rick Warren threw a bucketful of loaded words on the waning fires of controversy which erupted from his earlier comparison of homosexuality to incest and pedophilia.
Giving his critics no credit for good faith, Warren began with a false denial of his earlier incendiary [...]
An inaugural invocation by evangelical Baptist pastor Rick Warren and call for national voluntarism isn't what Focus on the Family Action anticipated [.pdf] in the trench warfare days prior to President Elect Obama's landslide Nov. 5 victory.
Further pursuing inclusion and voluntarism, the Obama Presidential Inaugural Committee has invited [...]
Do you have visions of sugarplums and exploding Southern Babtoy Corp. game-toys dancing in your head?
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It isn't too late to get a warning-never-included, problems never recorded, S. Babtoy Corp. never accepts responsiblity, this-isn't-a-game toy that uses you or your children or [...]
Newsweek's David Walters wrote Monday:
Times are tough, even in the salvation market. After decades of growth, the nation's largest group of Protestants, the Southern Baptist Convention, is reporting losses (in church membership and recorded baptisms) for the third year in a row. Baptisms are at a 20-year low, [...]
California Attorney General Jerry Brown's Prop. 8 argument appears to me to be well-grounded and prudent.
Submitted to a Candid World observes that the California Supreme Court has ruled several times that wholesale modifications of the constitutional structure cannot be accomplished by referendum.
To wit:
"Article XVIII of the constitution provides two [...]
Oddly, the Florida Times-Union's Sunday story What would Jesus blog? focuses on a blog whose name and URL it refused to disclose.
Times-Union Religion Writer Jeff Brunley wrote:
The blog's title and address are not being published because the blogger declined a Times-Union request to identify him- or [...]
Southern Baptist consciences are struggling with a "massive" Alabama insurance fraud which might have been prevented had one the accused faced criminal prosecution by the International Mission Board (IMB).
Rather than prosecute and deal with the attendant bad publicity, says from the Mobile Press-Register, [...]
Use of the Qur'an as an instrument of torture is a Guantánamo mistake that may do us harm for generations, warns Michael Peppard in the upcoming issue of the Catholic magazine Commonweal.
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Qur'an from the British Museum
Lord Harris
Some Rights ReservedReligious [...]
Did you know?
No one had to die under the feet of door-busting shoppers this morning. The 34-year-old employee who was trampled at a Long Island, N.Y., store would have been spared had more people celebrated Black Friday as Buy Nothing Day.
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On [...]
Wikipedia up-to-the-moment Mumbia entry and an Annonated Map of the attacks.
Photos from MumbaiThanks Vinu
There is also India Broadcasting Network live, streaming coverage (avoid this if you suffer from PTSD), or for less superheated up-to-date coverage, visit The Lede at the New York Times.
We [...]
Xerophyllum asphodeloides (turkey beard)
© 2004 Claude W. Rankin and Southern Connections Inc.
Turkey Beard sans gobble, this one bloomed sweet-smelling almost three decades ago in a burned-over Cumberland County, N.C., glade.
Claude W. Rankin.com, named for the late photographer who made [...]
Baptist Planet says, tongue firmly in ironic cheek, that the pope may have downplayed interfaith dialog just as a prominent Southern Baptist pastor argued, quite oddly, that Catholicism is a "cult".
Is the opinionated Jacksonville, Fla., pastor a Batholic, or perhaps a Cathist?
Uh huh. Read it all [...]
Chocolate isn't the only seasonal fair-trade foodstuff. Nor is refusal to countenance slavery inevitably a part of choosing fair-trade products over others.
Import Peace is non-profit organization that sells high-quality, fair-trade, USDA organic olive oil produced in Palestine.
Suffering from "political Stockholm Syndrome," the GOP is hostage to the "oogedy-boogedy" social fundamentalists, write Christine Todd Whitman and Robert M. Bostock in the Washington Post today.
So the GOP must give up the rabid identity politics of the culture wars and all [...]
Your pastor is a high-risk, even life-endangering choice for mental health advice, a recent Baylor University study found.
More than 32% of 293 previously diagnosed, "seriously mentally ill" church members reported that their pastor said they did not have a mental illness.
Misleading pastoral responses came most often from "conservative" or "charismatic" [...]
Fundamentalists beware of Public Television's The Bible's Buried Secrets. Or seek it out as I did, because it was created in good faith and explicitly to enlighten -- not to harm.
It offers archeological evidence and scholarly analysis if perhaps not the hill of inerrancy dramatically cited at the [...]
Fire inside and outside of church burns hotter and hotter over Mormon involvement in passage of California's Proposition 8.
"Happy Thanksgiving," soon to be "Joy to the world," unless you have the holiday blues -- a sometimes debilitating and dangerous disease.
Holiday depression is so commonplace and so hard to recognize that the Mayo Clinic has a Web page devoted to it, and depression support Web sites have [...]
"Batholics in Bohemia, ...or when your pastor enquires of you" is a Czeck cartoon which was inspired by Tony Cartledge's May 20, 2005, blog (no longer online) "Baptists or Batholics?" The caption translates, "Did you vote for Christian democratic party, Civic democratic party or [...]
The culture wars lost the election, we learn from a post-election poll published Nov. 14; the politics of the common good won.
Less than 20% of the "values voters" support the culture war's narrow, anti-abortion/anti-gay agenda, according to a Nov. 5-7 poll by [...]
About half of North Carolina churchgoers are Baptists, and for years have been increasingly divided against one another by the 1979 fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
On Nov. 12, the fundamentalists at Baptist State Convention of North Carolina meeting in Greensboro ended [...]
Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election might not have been the end of the culture wars, but it is certainly winding them down.
Frank Scheaffer, himself a former religious right advocate, points out that Obama's election reintroduces nuance to the American political and theological discourse.
He writes:
As our [...]
In a blistering critique of evangelical denigration of president-elect Barack Obama, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary head Danny Akin told told the N.C. Pastors' Conference in Greensboro that God had raised up Obama to be president.
Echoing the Nov. 5 view of Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological [...]
Created by ashley Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
Army Maj. Gen. David Blackledge has defied the American military culture of silence about psychiatric injuries, and defied our society's crippling prejudice against the mentally ill, by seeking treatment for and speaking [...]
Conservative Christian political leaders like Focus on the Family's James Dobson tried to explain it away, but the "God gap" that was twice important to Republican George W. Bush's victory, shifted toward Democrat Barack Obama.
That pronounced shift led the the Christian Science Monitor to say:
Some theologians suggest that the [...]
NBC News and the Associated Press yesterday officially decreed what most of us have known since late Tuesday night: North Carolina's electoral votes go to President-elect Barack Obama.
Obama is the first Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
This Democratic victory swept down the [...]
Citizen involvement a top Obama-Biden strategy as we can see at change.gov.
Drop by to tell your election story, share your ideas about how the Obama-Biden team can solve this country's overarching problems, apply for a job or browse through the trove of information there about the incoming Democratic administration.
Republican Sen. John McCain spoke honorably to the magnitude of President-elect Barack Obama's accomplishment last night and to the importance of working with him.
Restive McCain supporters must have noticed that McCain was gracious to Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin without promoting her as a future candidate for national office and [...]
Sen. Barack Obama was elected the 44th president and first black chief executive in our history Tuesday night.
"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, [...]
Neighbors reported blizzards of Liddy Dole/John McCain robocalls filling up answering machines without regard for whether they had voted, while the only boots-on-the-ground get-out-the-vote effort we saw here was Obama's.
Obama's GOTV team left beautiful, information-rich color "door hangers" which featured easy-to-read, personalized information about both [...]
Wylie School (Raleigh, N.C.)
There were six people in line, all courteous, smiling, nodding when I reached my Wylie School polling place this morning at 8:45.
Unconcerned about the secrecy of my ballot, I joined a couple voting with their children at a school cafeteria table. [...]
