Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century. You can follow him on Twitter @markdtooley.
America’s errors typically aren’t due to secularism or revived paganism but some form of Christian heresy. The Supreme Court’s creation of a right to same-sex marriage seems mostly Gnostic, not rooted in concrete law but an ethereal empowering of the supreme self. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion reads like a spiritual journey towards self-revelation, or Gnosis. […]
Recently a longtime United Methodist official, lamenting that Israel’s Independence Day obscured the Palestinian “Nakba” or catastrophe, urged boycotting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. until the Palestinians have their own Holocaust museum. Here’s the quote from Janet Lahr Lewis, “Advocacy Coordinator for the Middle East” at United Methodism’s General Board of Global Ministries in […]
Does Russell Crowe’s new WWI-era film The Water Diviner aim to demonize Christianity and exalt Islam? Or is it just a poignant story of an Australian father after the war searching for the bodies of his army sons killed by the Ottomans at Gallipoli? When Crowe’s bereaved wife commits suicide, the vicious local Catholic priest […]
Is Obama more Christian than David Cameron? Their respective Easter pronouncements might indicate so. The President gave “thanks for the extraordinary sacrifice that Jesus made for our salvation” and professed to “rejoice in the triumph of the Resurrection.” He pledged to “renew our commitment to live as He commanded — to love God with all […]
As many Evangelical elites and institutions squishily accommodate liberal trends, the National Religious Broadcasters group remains defiantly conservative, as its recent convention of over 4,000 ministry leaders abundantly confirmed, focusing on pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-Israel, and pro-religious liberty advocacy. Partly the defiance owes to NRB’s inherently populist character. Its membership includes thousands of Evangelical communicators, rooted […]
The reelection of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will certainly inflame the small but outspoken segment of American Protestantism that is anti-Israel. Mainline Protestant elites, undeterred by their empty pews, have been ideologically hostile to Israel for decades. More politically significant is the growing segment of Evangelical elites, many of them shifting left on a wide […]
Do Christian teaching and humanity demand the abolition of nuclear weapons? Yes, according to a Religion News Service column by Jacob Lupfer (a thoughtful writer and personal friend). He echoes what some church bodies have long or at least more recently urged. Virtually pacifist agencies of declining Mainline Protestantism have demanded full nuclear disarmament for […]
Kelly Gissendaner is on death row in Georgia, her execution having been postponed twice recently. Her religious faith and theological studies while in prison have gained her many admirers who are campaigning for commutation of her sentence amid much favorable media attention. One teacher from a Lutheran college, writing for CNN, first met Gissendaner in […]
President Obama’s prayer breakfast speech urging Christians and Americans to avoid a “high horse” before condemning Islamists in light of the Crusades and Jim Crow has provoked wider reflection on comparative national and cultural sins. Recently, prominent interfaith dialogue advocate Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School, in a conversation about ISIS, suggested that early founders […]
A couple sentences in President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, typically a benignly feel-good event, ignited great controversy. Citing ISIS horrors, Obama added: And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in […]
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