ReligionDispatches.org

Recent studies show that children as young as three years old use “brand cues” to choose among food and play options—and thus is a Pandora’s toybox opened. 

In this first installment, RD Contributing Editor Peter Laarman debates evangelical professor David Gushee over the Obama administration’s decision to effectively continue to allow recipients of federal faith-based funding to discriminate in hiring. In other clips, the two tangle on gay marriage, whether the Christian Right is dead, and more.

Sparked by his elderly mother’s impersonal medical care, our writer laments the fact that doctors aren’t spending nearly enough time listening to and getting to know their patients and its implications for a medical culture that focuses almost exclusively on the body; ignoring soul, spirit, and specificity.

We know that there is a significant “uncertain middle” of mainline clergy who would show leadership on LGBT issues if they were not afraid of stirring controversy in their congregations. A new campaign aims to jump start this missing conversation and to create space in American Christianity for a true welcoming of LGBT people and their families.

The Supreme Court struck down a century of regulations limiting corporate money in politics, clearing the way for a new Gilded Age. In the original Gilded Age (which inspired the Social Gospel movement), opposition was galvanized by a strong anti-corporate Christianity. Where's the religious opposition now?

On the eve of the vote for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, we contemplate the gulf between the incoherent story offered by the president’s party, and the compelling narrative—about systems of oppression, and the perils of a deeply entrenched status quo—of prophetic religion.

Tiger could take Brit Hume’s suggestion and get Jesus for his troubles but nobody should pretend that anything Christian is going on here.

Responsible religious leaders need to stay sober and stop cheerleading for the Democrats and for the Obama White House just because they’re not total Visigoths.

A new report on the isolated and lonely has our columnist calling on churches to open their doors and promote analog community.

Obama’s appearance at the climate change meeting is unlikely to change our “cheap-energy mind,” but alert faith leaders could begin the necessary Great Turning by showing their followers that conservation isn’t a sacrifice but a blessing.

In a time when “food insecurity” is used as a euphemism for hunger, religious leaders cannot be silent—or turn a deaf ear. 

Two strands of Christianity battle against a bill ensuring that all Americans are cared for. One prefers John Locke to Jesus while the other has its issues with women. 

Don’t the clergy have a duty to challenge the march of folly in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Has the shift from sociability to social-networking left Garrison Keillor clinging to his Wobegone Lutherans of yesteryear? What of the glaring problems of those “simpler times?”

Results of a new poll show that in matters of religion the right and left are in different universes. Why, then, are progressives so insistent on finding common ground?

Dick Armey mobilized his protest troops at the Capitol this weekend, and prompted this meditation from our columnist on the dangerous nostalgia for white dominance—then and now—that this anti-Obama movement calls forth.

As the media yawns at the latest unemployment numbers, our columnist seeks religious leadership on the taboo subject of our dysfunctional relationship to work. For even if the economy recovers and “full employment” returns, we will still be encountering a workplace that remains a site of utter terror in some instances and a site of routine abuse and low-grade anxiety in others.

Adherence to doctrine has long been a marker of faith among Christians. But what do the creeds and fine distinctions of theological argument have to do with commitment to justice?

We might be tempted to dismiss the entire legacy of an artist or thinker whose political position or moral beliefs do not accord with our own enlightened views. We forget that we, like they, are products of an age—and that what we are throwing away might be worth far more than the pieties we cling to.

What does it mean that Rhodes Scholar and Progressive Evangelical Brad Braxton resigned as senior pastor of the influential Riverside Church? In this discussion over the implications, a reverend and a scholar ask whether multiracial churches require making white people comfortable, why God needs liberal protestants to get out of the bubble, and what the future holds for the mainline church as a whole.

Few mainstream journalists are truly capturing the reality of the economy in terms of the nation’s worst off. As of last month, the actual number of workers in crisis is not the 14 million but more like 29 million, or 18 percent of the total workforce. Where are the religious coalitions willing to challenge the president’s policies?

In this meditation on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots an ordained minister, while eulogizing his own outlawry, notes that God’s goodness is evident in the way in which new and seriously maladjusted queer youth are still rising up to bring new energy and edge to the movement.

Why has so much religious leadership come to look like “the bland leading the bland”? On the occasion of Pentecost, we present a romp through the wide range of Protestantisms, and answer the question: Why is that biblical book called “Acts” and not “Lazing About”?

Even after the “revelation” that letting unregulated moneymen run the country isn't a good idea, the neoliberals at the Heritage Foundation are still churning out the message; like the latest book by “theologian” Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution And Not the Problem.

When we take the approach that “all are sinners,” we confuse big-time criminality with small-time folly. This moral obfuscation allows the far greater misfeasance of corporate creditors to get airbrushed out of the picture.