It’s time for a reboot. This edition of Weekend Plug-in marks the launch of something new.
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(ANALYSIS) During his 2,454 days in captivity — between strategic moves among 20 or more hiding places in Lebanon — journalist Terry Anderson was often allowed by Hezbollah leaders to read a Bible.
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(ANALYSIS) If someone asks me who the most famous preacher in the United States is, the answer is honestly quite simple. It’s Joel Osteen, by a mile. He leads Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. His congregation meets in what used to be the home of the Houston Rockets basketball team. Its seating capacity is nearly 17,000.
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(ANALYSIS) Here are a few added observations to Religion Unplugged’s continued reporting this election year on vigorous agitation against “Christian Nationalism” as a threat to American democracy, with “White” often added to signal racial animus. This accompanies heavy breathing overall about fusing religion with politics in multiplied events, books, articles, Internet postings and broadcast punditry.
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(ANALYSIS) The United Methodist Church’s General Conference will meet in Charlotte, North Carolina from April 23 to May 4, 2024. Originally scheduled for 2020 and delayed three times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this meeting of the church’s legislative body comes at a critical time for the United States’ second-largest Protestant denomination.
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Actually, we do need to talk about terms like “liberal” and “conservative” since the struggle to define these kinds of journalism labels was the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast.
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(ANALYSIS) The Congress of the XXV World Russian People’s Council, headed by Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, issued a document on March 27 entitled: “The Present and Future of the Russian World.” In the document, the leadership of the XXV World Russian People’s Council describes the conflict in Ukraine as a “Holy War.”
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This week’s Weekend Plug-in tackles five questions related to the United Methodist Church’s long-awaited General Conference, which starts next week in Charlotte, North Carolina. Plus, as always, catch up on all the best reads and top headlines in the world of faith.
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(ANALYSIS) Close observers of Eastern Orthodox Christianity were not surprised when the recent World Russian People’s Council bluntly rejected “abortion propaganda,” efforts to promote LGBTQ rights and this age of “sexual licentiousness and debauchery.” It wasn’t surprising when that Moscow conference urged the defense of traditional families, “strong with many children,” during an era where birth rates are falling.
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(ANALYSIS) One of the most important components of the Democratic coalition is the Black church. But I have to wonder if there are not cracks beginning to form in the alliance between the Democratic Party and Black Protestant Christianity.
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(ANALYSIS) On the festival of Baisakhi, celebrated usually on April 13, Sikhs the world over will joyously wear yellow saffron colors, symbolizing spring harvest and the solar new year, when the Sun enters the constellation Aries.
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This week’s Weekend Plug-in highlights five takeaways when attempting to define and measure Christian nationalism. Plus, as always, catch up on all the best reads and top headlines in the world of faith.
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Christians are divided on how to address this growing issue. One camp sees this as a problem — something that needs to be solved by helping people get married. The other sees the problem as the privileging of marriage — and that it’s the church that needs to adapt to reflect such societal changes. Here’s what some books are saying about the issue.
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(ANALYSIS) True Charity is a network of nearly two hundred organizations that seek to improve charity, influence relevant policy, and inform the public about the importance of effective compassion. The group held its annual conference last week in Springfield, Missouri.
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(ANALYSIS) In the late 1970s, researchers began asking why journalists often struggle when covering religion stories or avoid religious news altogether. I wrote my 1982 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate project on this topic, and some of that work was published by Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists. This week marks the start of my 36th year writing this “On Religion” column.
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(EXCERPT) Scholars have noted the similarities between the secular turn in our modern world and the ancient pagan one. In his new book, “Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World life the Early Church,” Stephen Presley considers how the early church engaged a pagan world and what we can learn from them. Here is an excerpt from the book.
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(ANALYSIS) The title, “1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture,” summarizes well this feature documentary, which argues how the misuse of a single word forever changed the course of history. Two researchers trace the origins of a grave mistranslation of the Bible in 1946 when the Revised Standard Version committee that two poorly understood and rarely-used Greek words would be combined and translated as homosexual.
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(ANALYSIS) “Judaism Is About Love” is a new book that thoroughly and poetically shatters the misconception that the God of the Hebrew Bible is about law, while the God of the New Testament is about love. As a result, it creates healthy parameters for disagreement between Jewish and Christian believers.
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(ANALYSIS) White evangelicals vote for Trump because White evangelicals are Republicans, and Donald Trump is the standard bearer of the GOP. That’s the same reason they voted for McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012. But have White evangelicals always been Republicans, or is this a very recent phenomenon?
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(ANALYSIS) Nearly 70% of Muslim Americans say they always give zakat, a yearly donation of 2.5% of one’s wealth that Islam encourages, during Ramadan according to a new study I worked on. Our Muslim Philanthropy Initiative research team at Indiana University surveyed 1,136 Muslims across the country in 2023 to assess the connection between Ramadan and zakat. We also looked into demographic differences in Muslim giving tied to Ramadan.
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