Group items tagged

>THE DIVINE COMMANDS to commit genocide found in the Old Testament are some of the most difficult and disturbing parts of scripture. Consider God's decree against the Amalekites: "Totally destroy everything ... Do not spare them; put to death ... children and infants" (1 Samuel 15:2-3). Such passages have been used repeatedly to justify bloodshed in the name of God, beginning with the Crusades and continuing right up through U.S. history, where texts were used in sermons to justify the slaughter of American Indians.... I'd like to propose that there is a better way-a way found in learning to read our Bibles as the apostle Paul read his. >Paul has removed the references to violence against Gentiles, and recontextualized these passages to instead declare God's mercy in Christ for Gentiles. This constitutes a major redefinition of how salvation is conceived: Instead of salvation meaning God "delivering" the ancient Israelites from the hands of their enemies through military victory (as described in Psalm 18, above), Paul now understands salvation to mean the restoration of all people in Christ, including those same "enemy" Gentiles.

"...As a transplanted Englishman one thing to which I've become rather sensitive is which prejudices New Yorkers are permitted to express in public.... It's really fine to say totally uninformed things about Mormonism in public, at dinner parties or wherever."

'For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box. In "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History," published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed. Mr. Hollinger's argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a "punctuation mark" on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom's "Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century"; Jill K. Gill's "Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left"; and David Burns's "Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus." The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.

'Some atheists have even gone public with their own prayer-for-health's-sake practice. Sigfried Gold, (recent subject in Washington Post) is a thoughtful, articulate 50-y.o. man who lives in Takoma Park, Md., He long ago decided that there was no stuff in the universe that was not physical - no supernatural, no divine. So he joined a 12-step program to control his food addiction. One of the steps is to turn your problem over to a higher power. So Mr. Gold created a god he doesn't believe exists: a large African-American lesbian. Every day Mr. Gold dropped to his knees to pray, and every day he spent 30 minutes in meditative quiet time. These days Mr. Gold, who calls himself a "born-again atheist," doesn't smoke. He doesn't drink. And, at 5 feet 7 inches, he weighs 150 pounds. So is there a downside? There were times when people got so engrossed with prayer that they seemed almost addicted - so compelled to pray that they could not stop. Some called this "puking" prayer. Whom does this intense imaginative immersion put at risk, and when? A study of the popular Internet game World of Warcraft suggests an intriguing answer. The anthropologist Jeffrey G. Snodgrass and his colleagues set out to study this complex social world. They found people who were relaxed and soothed by their play: "Sometimes I just log on late at night and go out by myself and listen to the soothing music." Others felt addicted: "Once I start playing it's hard to tell whether or not I'll have the willpower to stop." What made the difference was whether people found their primary sense of self inside the game or in the world. When play seemed more important than the real world did, they felt addicted; when it enhanced their experience of reality outside the game, they felt soothed. Prayer works in similar ways. When people use prayer to enhance their real-word selves, they feel good. When it disconnects them from the everyday, as it did for the

Out of Tragedy, Questions About God: 4 out of 5 letters (surprising proportion for NYTimes) object to Wood's either/or view of theodicy: if God is omnipotent (& doesn't prevent suffering), he is cruel; if God is loving and good (and only comforts, but doesn't prevent suffering), he is weak and worth ignoring. They affirm the mystery "that God is deeply present in and through the events of the world - often inscrutably, but always powerfully and lovingly - and though we cannot for the life of us see how, even catastrophes include divine presence and power." A Christian notes that fellow believer "might counter [that] suffering and death come to all, even to a God who in his love took on our mortal, vulnerable condition as his own."