Ted Haggard Ted Haggard, as some of you may recall, was the head guy of the National Association of Evangelicals as well as pastor of New Life Church. He was a pretty popular dude. That is, of course, until a sex scandal took him down. Now he’s back on the upswing – he’s happy, his [...]
Posts Tagged ‘religion’
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Atheists
July 22nd, 2010
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UPDATE: The original post at Nonprophet Status has made it to the front page of WordPress.com. WOOHOO! My dear friend Chris Stedman over at the Nonprophet Status blog (Respecting Religion, Staying Secular) invited me to write a guest post for him. So I did. It’s called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Atheists“, [...]
The volunteering religious (noun)
February 10th, 2010
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I stumbled upon this nifty little chart through Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic. 63 million people, or 27% of the population, volunteered last year. That’s an incredible statistic. It shows just how involved Americans are in helping their communities/the world. What’s even more telling is the proportion of volunteers by type of organization. Look [...]
Losing old gods, finding nature
January 26th, 2010
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I recently headed back to Colorado for a wonderful weekend of R&R with my girlfriend and her family. We went skiing at Crested Butte, an absolutely amazing mountain way out in the center of the state. Here’s what happens when I ski: 1. I fall down. This happens a handful of times. During this particular [...]
Terrorism, poverty, and violence
January 25th, 2010
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It’s not that poverty doesn’t move them, but more correctly it is an interpretation of poverty that radicalizes (and is itself radical). When I started my studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, I made the mistake of joking with a German colleague. We were discussing “terrorism” as a theoretical [...]
Religious literacy
January 23rd, 2010
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US Airways flight diverted after passenger “caught” praying. How’s that for a headline? Let’s go with our gut reaction – it was a Muslim, wasn’t it? Wrong. Those lines are lifted from the news story. What kind of a person wraps straps around his head to pray? Jews, that’s who. Observe: Yeah. A plane was [...]
Proof of Mozart
November 10th, 2009
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I needed to learn a bit more about Meister Eckhart, so I Googled him last night. That led me to Eckhart Tolle, and to Paul Tillich, and then finally to Karl Barth this morning. I guess you could call it a theologian binge. In my readings, I happened upon this interesting quotation by Barth: It [...]
Rami Nashashibi and Joshua Dubois
October 27th, 2009
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Rami Nashashibi (Executive Director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network) and Joshua Dubois (head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships) spoke to us today. Again, much of this will appear as stream-of-consciousness writing, with intermixing of paraphrasing and quotations. Nashashibi addressed us first, saying that our conference was aimed at rekindling the [...]
Just peacemaking
October 26th, 2009
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This might be a bit like stream-of-consciousness, but I don’t want to spend time re-editing this later. It’s a workshop on the just peacemaking paradigm. Susan Brooks-Thistlethwaite (Interfaith Youth Core board member and former seminary president) gave us a brief history of the transition of the United Church of Christ into a pacifist church. The [...]
Why faith? Part 2
October 23rd, 2009
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A previous post addressed the religious imperative against malaria from the standpoint of those of us in the US, UK, and Canada. So why is the Faiths Act campaign so explicit about the work of churches and mosques on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa? As it turns out, religious communities in the developing world are [...]
