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If you were looking for cutting-edge discussions of gay theology back in the 1980s, all you had to do was head on over to the Iliff School of Theology, the United Methodist campus attached to the University of Denver. As one former faculty member of the university once told me, Iliff in that era was “the most liberal institution in American that still called itself Christian.”
As most American denominations have more or less accommodated themselves to the culture around them, the Amish and their countercultural ways have remained a topic of fascination to their fellow citizens. Only a 20-minute drive from where my family lives, Lancaster County has made an industry of Amish life — some Amish participate in reaching out to tourists who want to vicariously experience Amish life.
The impression we get from this New York Times profile of the other Ted Olson — that’s conservative legal mind Theodore Olson, not Christianity Today managing editor Ted Olsen — is that you’ve got to skip Sunday school if you want to think independently on the subject of same-sex marriage.
We haven’t seen a bill voted out of the House of Representatives yet, but the culture war about health care reform is in full tilt, with allegations from conservatives that bills will include federal funding for abortions — not to mention “death panels” that will chose who will live, and who will die.
Since I became a member of my congregation almost a dozen years ago, we’ve had a huge increase in the number of young children attending. Hang on, this is linked to a news story.
Some days, posting for GetReligion requires a great deal of work to explain some theological nuance that a reporter failed to understand. Other days, the work is downright easy. As is the case with pointing out the bias and problems in this hacktastic Associated Press piece on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
As a reborn opinion journal, Newsweek has to keep up with cultural trends. A few weeks ago, it announced to its readers that polyamory, the practice of multiple relationships in which each partner is aware of the other ones, is going, if not mainstream, than at least tributary.
I continue to be amazed at the degree to which the debates about health-care reform keep cycling back to issues of money and, let’s face it, religion.
Some sex scandals are sad but exciting and some are just unseemly. This Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino one is a doozie. The married father of five had unprotected sex six years ago with a woman he had just met earlier in the evening and when she claimed to have gotten pregnant from the encounter he gave her $3,000. He says the money was for insurance. She says it was for an abortion. And then years later he went to the FBI after, he says, her extortion attempts got out of hand.
