They Rise
guest post by Don Underwood
“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.” (Cormac McCarthy, The Road)
Is it possible that something holy and profound might grow out of this moment?
The most extraordinary thing about the Christian faith is not that we believe in a transcendent God, or that life does not just end at the grave, or that failure and sin can be overcome by something we call grace (or love). It is the fact that all these beliefs are rooted in the dark moment of the Cross, in the deadly betrayal of a follower, in the cowardly lack of leadership by a politician, in the pitiful cheers of ordinary human beings who, for reasons inexplicable, cried “Crucify him!” Had we been there, we would surely have experienced the chaos and the hate and the cruelty as some kind of prelude to the end of times, or at least to some kind of dystopia that would not be worth enduring. Instead, we look back at that moment when all of humanity hung on the cross, and we proclaim it as a beginning rather than an ending. That is why we willingly descend into the season of Lent; ironically, it is our great affirmation that hope rises from the ashes.
I’ve been hearing the voices of children this week. 
I use that word carefully, because they are not children if judged by maturity or ability or even wisdom…
Finish reading here:
https://charlottevaughancoyle.com/2018/02/rise-guest-post-don-underwood/
Has Evangelical Christianity Become Sociopathic?
May 11, 2017
Since Evangelical Christianity began infiltrating politics, officially in the late 1970s, there has been a disturbing trend to limit or remove rights from those who don’t meet the conservative idea of an American. Many of these initiatives come in the form of “religious freedom” laws, which empower discrimination, while other legislation targets immigrants who believe differently. The result has been a sharp division in American culture, and the redefinition of Christian theology.
Evangelical speaker, author, and university professor, Tony Campolo, said Christianity was redefined in the mid-70s by positions of “pro-life” and opposing gay marriage. “Suddenly theology fell to the background,” he said. And somewhere in the middle of all the change, Evangelical Christianity crossed the line of faith and belief to hatred and abuse. Those who cruelly implement the actions of their faith are oblivious to the destruction they cause to their religion, or the people their beliefs impact. Is it fair to call it sociopathic?
Read the entire article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/has-evangelical-christianity-become-sociopathic_us_5914ce6fe4b02d6199b2ed92
8 Things I Wish We Christians Would Admit
Chris Kratzer
May 11, 2017
Nobody’s perfect, that’s for sure. We’re all on a spiritual journey in life that is both complicated and filled with ample opportunity for blunder. Yet ironically, within much of modern Christianity, faith qualities of mystery, vulnerability, humility, inability, and uncertainty are often deemed to be sure signs of weakness and nonconformity—what God has painted with beautiful shades of grey and fragility, we quickly want to thin into black and white. Unfortunately, this starch-pressed and cut-and-dry way of believing has rendered our brand of Christian faith to be one that is highly resistant and adverse to healthy criticism, introspection, change, and the embracing of fresh revelation. In the eyes of many who look upon us, ours is a Christianity fortified behind towering walls, moated with religious hoops, and purposed on allegiance, conformity, and world domineering. The presence of questions, doubts, uncertainty, individuality, and the recalibration of one’s beliefs are largely unwelcome and unwanted in many of our spiritual precincts. Some have gone so far as to even suggest that we have become deaf to the cries of Jesus upon our callous, cut-and-paste way of believing and living.
Read the blog here: http://chriskratzer.com/8-things-i-wish-we-christians-would-admit/
The global refugee crisis is a moral test for all of us (COMMENTARY)
Western claims to stand for human dignity and human rights usually look pretty hollow whenever a major refugee crisis hits. That is what is happening now, as millions of refugees seek asylum in Europe — and mainly run into closed doors and cold shoulders.
The current crisis is a grave one. According to Amanda Taub, 19 million people today are refugees. They come from all over, though today especially from Africa and the Middle East. Four million have fled Syria since 2011. They are making global headlines as they surge into Europe, which is for many just the latest stop on a desperate odyssey.
They are dying in disturbing numbers — in rickety boats, sealed trucks and squalid refugee dumping grounds. They are not wanted where they come from and not wanted where they are going.
The post-World War II world order was predicated on a global commitment to “never again” allow the mass violation of human dignity and human rights that the world had just witnessed. The very first line of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads:
“Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”
Article 14 says “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” ….
A New Generation Of Faith-Based Activism
Older generations often deem Millennials as lackadaisical or noncommittal towards religion. This criticism can largely be attributed to a rising number of young Americans who choose not to formally identify with a religious tradition. Typically referred to as “nones,” this increasing general population of Americans forgo a specific religious affiliation and may shun religious institutions or criticize overtly religious rhetoric in the public square. The nones are young—roughly one in three Americans under 30 (32 percent) identify as such. Yet while religiously unaffiliated Millennials may be skittish to associate with a formal religious group, they are not necessarily anti-religious.
The values that influence the political priorities of nones are shared with affiliated Americans of many religious traditions. A survey from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life finds the overwhelming majority of the religiously unaffiliated (78 percent) think religion brings people together and helps strengthen community bonds, while 51 percent express concern churches and religious organizations are too concerned with money and power. Many Millennials are simply frustrated by cultural divisions wrought by religion, but still turn to faith as a source of inspiration for achieving a more just world.
Faithful Millennials are finding common ground with supposed adversaries and pointing to a new way forward, as evidenced by the present landscape of young activists working towards LGBTQ equality, racial justice, and sexual and reproductive health and rights….
Read the entire article at Generation Progress:
http://genprogress.org/voices/2015/08/18/38947/a-new-generation-of-faith-based-activism/
Mean Christians in the Digital Age
Posted:
What baffles me most is how some Christians participate in online meanness and incivility. I’m not sure how people whose identifying characteristic is supposed to be love justify treating others with contempt because they disagree with them (Granted, church history is dotted all along the way with mean Christians, but I keep hoping we’ll learn to do better)….
Read the entire article on Huffington Post
Faith Leaders: ‘A World Without Planned Parenthood Would Be Disastrous’
by Jack Jenkins
Faith groups are speaking out about their support for Planned Parenthood, offering a prayerful defense of the national women’s health organization after a series of misleading videos sparked a movement to end its federal funding.
In early August, members of the U.S. Congress began calling for the federal government to stop giving financial support to Planned Parenthood. The movement was spurred largely by right-wing religious and political leaders outraged over a series of highly edited — and possibly illegal — videos accusing one of the country’s largest family planning providers of profiting off of the sale of fetal tissue.
But as the U.S. Senate readied to vote on the issue, a group of more than 50 faith-based organizations signed on to a letter urging the Senate to end the push to defund Planned Parenthood, proclaiming “a world without Planned Parenthood would be disastrous for many women and their families.”
Read the article here:
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/08/14/3691784/faith-groups-defend-planned-parenthood/
Why It’s Getting Trickier For GOP Candidates To Talk About Faith
by Jack Jenkins
During an interview with CNN last Friday, Florida Senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio made a passionate defense of his faith, talking over the interviewer while explaining why his religious beliefs inform his politics.
“I’m happy that my faith influences my political positions,” Rubio said. “Because my faith teaches me to care for the needy, my faith teaches me to respect and love even my enemies, and my faith teaches me to forgive those who slight me. So people should hope that my faith influences my political position.”
Rubio was speaking about how his Catholicism impacts his position on abortion, which he opposes in all cases (except when he doesn’t) because he shares the Catholic Church’s belief that life begins at conception. It’s a classic Republican tactic we’ve all seen before: State a policy position, argue it’s rooted in your faith, then move on — presumably because progressives or even fellow conservatives won’t argue with you about it. Although this tendency to claim an unchallenged faith prevailed among party faithful for decades, it ascended to national prominence during the tenure of former president George W. Bush, who rose to power in 2000 due in part to support from evangelical Christians.
But as the 2016 primary season begins to heat up, many Republicans are starting to see the right-wing monopoly over “religion” fade away. Instead, attempts to appeal to faith are becoming more inert, as progressives and even conservatives are citing their own religious beliefs as reason to oppose the policies of GOP White House hopefuls….
Did you hear about the pastor who was arrested for not marrying a same-sex couple? What about the publisher that got sued for refusing to censor anti-gay verses from the Bible?
Both of these stories have been exposed as fakes of course, but that didn’t keep hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians from sharing them online this week. When I pointed out to a friend that the story he had just shared on social media wasn’t true, he replied, “well it might as well be. Christians in this country are under attack.”
It has become a familiar refrain.…
Read the entire article at Rachel’s blog:
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/persecution-complex
Meet The Evangelicals Who Cheered The SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling
After the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage last week, the heavyweights of evangelical Christianity — like Franklin Graham, the president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention — charged forward to voice their discontent.
Yet a smaller but equally impassioned group of evangelicals celebrated the fact that marriage equality is no longer just a dream for LGBT couples across America. And it’s these leaders who may be pointing to the future of the movement.
About 100 evangelical pastors and leaders signed an online letter published Friday supporting the ruling, and then went one step further by calling on Christians around the country to continue to work for LGBT rights in other areas — like bullying in schools and employment and housing discrimination.
“As Evangelical pastors and leaders, we believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of good news for all people,” the letter read. “For far too long, we have been silent and complicit in the discrimination and marginalization of LGBTQ people around the world. Today, we commit to no longer stand by while discrimination and inequity flourish, but to lift our voices on behalf of all of God’s children.”
Read the entire article here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unfundamentalistchristians/2015/06/warning-this-world-has-redefined-the-word-love/
The Benedict Option: Why the religious right is considering an all-out withdrawal from politics
Have you heard of the Benedict Option? If not, you will soon.
It’s the name of a deeply pessimistic cultural project that’s capturing the imaginations of social conservatives as they come to terms with the realization that the hopes and assumptions that animated the religious right over the past 35-odd years have been dashed by the sweeping triumph of the movement for same-sex marriage.
From the start, the religious right has been marked by two qualities: optimism and a faith in majoritarianism. The qualities are connected. Think back to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. The name conveyed its ideology: A majority of Americans are morally and religiously conservative. To the extent that the nation’s politics and culture don’t reflect that, it’s because they have been co-opted by a secular liberal minority that has placed itself in control of such elite institutions as the media, Hollywood, the universities, the judiciary, and the federal bureaucracy. The proper response is to take back these institutions using democratic means, primarily elections.
In other words, play by the rules of the democratic game, and social conservatives will eventually triumph.
This sounded like a fantasy at first, since the movement began among evangelical Protestants, who never made up more than about 25 percent of the population, and whose style of worship and belief was profoundly off-putting to non-evangelical Christians, let alone to more secular Americans. But ecumenical and inter-religious efforts throughout the 1980s and early 1990s helped to forge an alliance among conservative believers in many faith traditions: evangelicals, but also Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and Muslims. This made talk of majorities at least plausible, and seemed to vindicate the optimism, too.
Read the rest of the article here: http://theweek.com/articles/555734/benedict-option-why-religious-right-considering-allout-withdrawal-from-politics
Two Sisters, Two Views of Gay Marriage
A pair of siblings on opposite sides of the debate finds that their disagreement does not erase their love for each other.
Elizabeth Corey and Mary Campbell
“I know that in this day and age many thousands, if not millions, of families find themselves in predicaments similar to ours. My desire is that our joint disclosure might help others begin to open their hearts and minds to one another. I hope that they can find both the courage and the charity to have those difficult but potentially transformative conversations that they, like we, have avoided for such a long time.”
Read more here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/i-choose-at-once-to-love-my-sister-and-disagree-with-her-on-gay-marriage/392279/
Bruce Jenner: Coming Out Conservative, Christian, and Privileged
Hey there, Bruce Jenner. I heard you just moved into a gorgeous hilltop home in Malibu. I was wondering if you would reconsider and move to Louisiana where I live. Ours is a unique land of crawfish and meat pies, piney woods and bayous, Carnival season and year-round festivals.
You have courageously come out — as a Republican, a conservative, and a Christian. Now that you are openly claiming your real political self, why stay in California where conservatives are in the minority? Leave that Blue State with its liberal Democratic governor and human-rights-for-all agenda. Come to my Southern Red State — Louisiana — where you could live in a world ordered and ruled by folks who share your values: Republican, conservative, and Christian.
“Is [being a Republican] a bad thing?” you asked. See for yourself. Move to Louisiana and have your own Red State experience. You could fully immerse yourself in the discrimination and restrictions that conservative Christian-identified Republicans have legislated for anyone who is LGBT in Louisiana.
Read more here: http://revgalblogpals.org/2015/05/04/bruce-jenner-coming-out-conservative-christian-and-privileged/
Faith must fight capitalism: Forget theological purity — the church needs a revolutionary spirit
Saturday, Apr 25, 2015 by
…The very definition of what it means to be a Christian must be salvaged now, taken back, by force if necessary, from those who domesticated a way of life and turned it into a quarreling quagmire of noisy “believers.” While we fiddle with the meaning of the Trinity, present-day Rome is burning. While we mumble our prayers for the poor, their poverty and pain increase by the hour. While we coddle the industries that ravage the earth for energy and then market death to us disguised as comfort, the conscience of the faithful has been euthanized by public relations campaigns that make us swoon with gratitude for the humanitarian altruism of Big Oil.
Where are the holy fools for God today? Who stands out in the crowd as a troublemaker for justice? Where can we find the spiritual contrarian, unplugged and unmoved by the choreographed hysteria of celebrity culture? Where do we find real wisdom in the age of the blog, where everyone with an opinion can self-publish, where authors presume not to need editors in a worldwide web of intellectual autoeroticism?
The sad truth is that to help the American church “grow” we have dressed it in the uniform of Western culture. We have taught its leaders to be entrepreneurs, and to fret more about parking spaces than about peace and justice. We sing familiar hymns, but the lyrics fall on deaf ears. We recite creeds in worship that move no one, while others have decided they cannot speak them aloud in good conscience. In short, countless communities of faith are engaged in a charade on Sunday morning. The pews are full of pretenders.
Read entire article at Salon.com
Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers is senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, Oklahoma City, and professor of social justice in the Philosophy Department, Oklahoma City University. He is a peace activist and the best-selling author of six books. He lives in Oklahoma City with his wife, three children, and two grandchildren.
Black clergy plan African tour to fight homophobia
by Eliel Cruz April 16, 2015
Christianity has a history of using colonization as a means to promote, or sometimes impose, theology. Now, in a fashion reminiscent to colonialist days, some American Christians are using Christianity to promote anti-LGBT messages throughout the African continent.
And some black pastors are fighting back.
A group of African-American Christian leaders have launched a new initiative to eradicate homophobia in African countries.
The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM) announced a month long tour targeting African countries that have been heavily exposed to anti-LGBT evangelical rhetoric such as Uganda, Rwanda, Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya. Their goal is to counter evangelical anti-LGBT conferences that have targeted African communities….
“The use of religion to justify discrimination against LGBTQ people anywhere is immoral and should be rejected by all people of faith,” Rev. Rodney McKenzie, Jr., Faith Work Director at the National LGBTQ Task Force told me in an email. “Faith leaders have a responsibility to share the good news of God’s radical welcome and unwavering love. Anything less is religious malpractice.”
Read more here:
http://elielcruz.religionnews.com/2015/04/16/black-clergy-plan-african-tour-fight-homophobia/?utm_content=buffer07aa4&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Ohio ministers’ sermons to support same-sex marriage
Chris Geggie, campaign manager of Why Marriage Matters Ohio, said it’s important for people of faith to speak out because there tends to be a misleading narrative that says people of faith can’t support same-sex marriage. He said members of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu beliefs have expressed support for the campaign.
“As people of faith, we love everyone and accept them for who they are,” he said. “As far as marriage equality, it comes down to the Golden Rule: We want to treat people the way we want to be treated.”
Sermon Sunday comes nine days before the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on the same-sex marriage issue in cases from Ohio and three other states…
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/04/11/ohio-ministers-sermons-to-support-gay-marriage.html
Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana
Our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.
“Human understanding of what is sinful has changed over time,” said David Gushee, an evangelical Christian who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University. He openly challenges his faith’s censure of same-sex relationships, to which he no longer subscribes.
Why I Think My Church Is Upset About Indiana’s RFRA
by Rick Lowery April 1, 2015
My church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), is moving our 2017 General Assembly out of my hometown Indianapolis in response to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), recently signed by Governor Mike Pence. This is painful for our church and for my family.
Since my wife is general minister and president of the church and we are residents of Indianapolis — she was baptized here, went to school here, and we were married here — I’ve been giving a good bit of thought to this the last few days. I’m a Bible scholar and minister, not a lawyer or judge; but I’ve studied the history of RFRA and think I understand what’s at stake.
Supporters of Indiana’s law say this is much ado about nothing because we’ve had RFRA laws since Bill Clinton signed the original federal law in 1993. States like Illinois, with the support of state senator Barack Obama, passed their own versions of RFRA a few years later, after the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the federal law didn’t cover states and municipalities. These earlier laws, supporters of Indiana’s RFRA say, had nothing to do with legalizing discrimination and neither does Indiana’s law. They’re right about the earlier laws.
Indiana’s law is different for three reasons:
- its timing,
- what it adds, and
- what it doesn’t add….
Read the rest of the article on Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-lowery-phd/why-i-think-my-church-is-upset-about-indianas-rfra_b_6982544.html
The One Sacred Gift All Religions Share
From birth until death, our rituals may differ, but our commonality is as clear as clean water.
http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2015/03/19/the-one-sacred-gift-all-religions-share/36404
Religious liberty and naked beach parties
I’m inclined to agree with the police chief’s conclusion: “That isn’t a church.” This certainly appears to be what he and other local officials have concluded — an attempt to exploit the tax-status of a church while operating as a club geared to attract partying spring breakers.
But local officials — police departments, appraisers, liquor boards and the like — are obligated to be cautious and deferential whenever their roles require them to make a determination about whether something is or is not “a church.”
An Open Letter to Franklin Graham
Frankly, Rev. Graham, your insistence that “Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and everybody else” “Listen up,” was crude, insensitive, and paternalistic. Your comments betrayed the confidence that your brothers and sisters in Christ, especially those of color, have afforded your father’s ministry for decades. Your instructions oversimplified a complex and critical problem facing the nation and minimized the testimonies and wisdom of people of color and experts of every hue, including six police commissioners that served on the president’s task force on policing reform.
In the nadir of your commentary, you tell everyone to “OBEY” any instruction from authorities and suggest that the recent shootings of unarmed citizens “might have been avoided” if the victims had submitted to authority.
And you bluntly insist, “It’s as simple as that.” It is not that simple…
http://sojo.net/blogs/2015/03/19/open-letter-franklin-graham
Yes, There Is Christian Persecution in America And Here’s What it Looks Like
And so here is where my critics have been right all along: there is anti-Christian persecution in America. The chief difference however, is that it’s not the secularists or atheists who are persecuting us – it’s “Christians” who are doing the persecuting.
Francis Agonistes
The Pope is engaged in a struggle to bring the Church into the modern age. And American conservatives are fighting him every step of the way.
Why I’m Coming Out as a Christian
The truth of this world’s impermanence also suggests that my anxiety about coming out as Christian has a perversely self-interested aspect. It is true that I feel intimidated by a conservative culture that seems intent on creating boundaries around Christianity rather than open doors. But it is also true that I wrote this article knowing that at least a few of them will probably like it – some might even tell me it needed to be written. The image of Christianity and progressivism as a newly hip fusion genre—it’s fucking edgy, man—is a strong siren song.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/28/why-i-m-coming-out-as-a-christian.html
Following MLK’s Example Means Ending Our ‘Whatever’ Mindset
February 15, 2015 by Rev. Michael Livingston 
God has no tolerance for whatever. And Martin Luther King Jr. had no tolerance for it either. In 1959 he said, “Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.” Six years later, in 1965, he described his vision for where that career in humanity should lead us: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”
Today, are we not a society that has lost its conscience?
http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/15/black-history-month-king-end-whatever/
State of the States on Same-sex Marriage
February 11, 2015
Following a dramatic shift in attitudes on same-sex marriage over the last decade, courts and state legislatures across the nation have reversed or struck down laws banning gay and lesbian couples from marrying legally. Most recently, courts in Alabama struck down such a ban despite the strong opposition to same-sex marriage in the state–no state expresses lower support for same-sex marriage in the country. Using new data from the American Values Atlas, we’re now able to see how each separate state feels about same-sex marriage. So where does your state stand?
http://publicreligion.org/2015/02/state-of-the-states-on-gay-marriage/
Education & age divide American religion — 44 religious groups in one graph
“As H. Richard Niehbur reported nearly a century ago, American denominations were created along social divisions. While the greatest division is race, there are also divisions based on class. These class divisions are not as strong as they once were, but they persist nonetheless.
There are also other demographic differences uncovered by sociologists. One of these is age…”
Can Obama Walk the Tightrope of Religious Rhetoric in a Polarized America?
To Live As If I Believed: The Thin Spaces of Children’s Literature
February 15, 2015 by
“Childhood is guarded by the hope and audacity to believe in things which people, individual experience, and rationality will gradually make difficult to maintain. This willingness to believe is a way of seeing, which our society allows as long as we are young. It is an unbridled way of looking at the world which we are encouraged to recant as we mature.As an adult, I have known only one experience where irrationality and the unseen remain unbridled and protected. Art has kept the boundary between my ‘grown-up’ world and the immaterial thin…”
http://www.onbeing.org/blog/to-live-as-if-i-believed-the-thin-spaces-of-childrens-literature/7281
Obama’s Liberal Protestant Faith
At the recent National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama offered “an apt expression of a liberal Protestant faith. And that is the way he situates doubt and humility as the center piece of a worthy faith. When we are willing to see ourselves as limited, as finite, as human as anyone else who is struggling to make sense of our world, then we can have a more generous estimation of our neighbor. We all participate in the same world, the same unknowns, the same needs as humans. And our traditions can be gifts instead of weapons to be used against others on the same journey.”
http://approachingjustice.net/2015/02/06/obamas-liberal-protestant-faith/
Separation of Church and State Is Important, But So Is Faith in Congress
“Many people think when politics and religion mix, the consequences are disastrous. It simply doesn’t have to be that way. We can and must draw a distinction between the imposition of specific religious prescriptions, and the drive and motivation that comes from the bedrock values of our great faith traditions which can move our policy agenda to a better, more just, and inclusive place.”
http://time.com/3684353/separation-of-church-and-state-is-important-but-so-is-faith-in-congress/
Conversations on the Intersection Between Faith and Science
The award-winning public radio program On Being, with Krista Tippett, has provided us with in-depth audio interviews on the intersection between faith and science with a range of guests including theoretical physicists and Vatican Observatory astronomers. Lesson of the New Atheist Muslim-Killer
You do not have to believe in God at all to recognize an obvious truth: that there is something wrong with us.It is also in our nature to disguise our own tendency to sin, individually and collectively, from ourselves…”http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/new-atheist-muslim-killer/