Christianity

A group that "celebrate[s] the inherent goodness of adolescent sexuality" and calls for clergy to "speak out against... coercive parental notification and consent for reproductive health services" has just released a study that concludes by calling on American theological seminaries to go over the birds and bees with their students. Yet in reporting on the study by the Religious Institute on…

The conservative movement lost a great intellectual voice on Thursday. The Reverend Richard John Neuhaus died due to complications from cancer at the age of 72. Neuhaus, a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of New York, was a well-known pro-life advocate, and founded First Things in 1990, a periodical focused on advancing “a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.” We…

The weekend edition of Good Morning America found a fellow that decided to try and live for one year "like Jesus would" but what host Bill Weir found keenly interesting is that this guy voted for Barack Obama because he felt that living like Jesus compelled him to do so. Weir also wondered if the Jesus emulator had to "forgive" his Christian community for any reaction they might have had over the…

Would Good Morning America invite as a guest a liberal who'd never voted for a Democrat but who after a year spent trying to live like Jesus decided to vote for McCain?  I doubt it.  But when an evangelical who'd never voted for a Democrat spent such a year and decided to vote for Obama, GMA devoted a segment to his storyRev. Ed Dobson is the evangelical in question, and let me begin by saying…

National Public Radio's Morning Edition celebrated the end of 2008 on New Year’s Eve with black commentator (and Huffington Post contributor) John Ridley listing the top "non-troversies" of 2008, which he defined as "what seemed monumental then, in retrospect has all the significance of a Dennis Kucinich stump speech." Ridley’s top "non-troversy" was Reverend Wright’s sermon clips about America…

First it's Christmas lights, now it's Christmas dinner...causing global warming.Yep. People who cook more than their guests will eat and throw the food away are destroying the planet.I'm not kidding.ABCNews.com in Australia reported the following absurdity on Christmas Eve:

When during its first half-hour this Christmas morning "Today" moved to a conversation between Matt Lauer and Pastor Rick Warren, I braced myself.  Don't tell me, I thought, they're going to get into the invitation Pres.-elect Obama extended him to give the invocation at the Inauguration, and the reaction of some gay-rights groups. Well, surprise!  They didn't: not in word or implication.  Warren…

This is really delicious, and should cheer up the grinchiest of Grinches and the scroogiest of Scrooges:Rumors that Santa Claus may be the latest and most high-profile victim of the worldwide credit crisis sent world stock markets roiling and children's hopes plummeting today as Wall Street analysts warned that Santa's entire production and distribution network could collapse by the end of the…

In 2005, I sensed that journalists in general prefer to call this time of the year in commerce that of “holiday shopping” instead of “Christmas shopping,” but that when it came to people losing their jobs, they preferred to describe layoffs as relating to “Christmas.” My instincts have been proven correct during the past three years. So did anything change in 2008? Not that much, but slightly in…

Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a voice crying in the wilderness that the mainstream media and middle class America weren't quite ready for and megachurch pastor Rick Warren is an ignorant evangelical rube who isn't totally without hope, given his awareness of AIDS and other favored liberal causes. That's essentially what Eleanor Clift preached to her choir in her December 19 "Capitol Letter" column, "…

An astonishing thing happened in Baghdad on Saturday: Christians, apparently for the first time in the city's history, publicly celebrated Christmas.CNN's Jill Dougherty published an article about this extraordinary event at the network's website Sunday which included a video of her interviewing Iraqis of varied religious beliefs at the scene.However, from what I can tell, this extremely charming…