Throughout American history, religion has played a significant role in promoting social reform. From the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century to the civil rights movement of the 20th century, religious leaders have championed progressive political causes. This legacy is evident today in the group called religious progressives, or the religious left. The social gospel movement […]
The religious Left is tired of being marginalized. In recent months, several faith leaders have redoubled their efforts to create a meaningful movement that can undermine the religious Right and oppose President Trump’s agenda. Reverend William J. Barber II is at the forefront of these efforts. The Evangelical pastor holds liberal views on gay and transgender […]
In my very first week of college, I was assigned to describe the best form of government. As a recent high school graduate, my only previous exposure to political philosophy was an AP Government revelation that the Founding Fathers’ famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence was borrowed from some guy named John Locke. So […]
n the introduction to his 1987 Cultural Literacy, E.D. Hirsch Jr. laments the loss of a shared American culture — a body of knowledge, from Shakespeare to the Bible, that united Americans. He recalls his father’s propensity for quoting a particular truncated line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar whenever encouraging his colleagues to act swiftly: “there is a tide [in […]
After the horrific attacks of September 11, a contingent of four atheists charged into the public eye, calling for a New Atheism and the rise of a disillusioned generation. The acclaimed Four Horsemen—an appropriately ironic moniker—sought to delegitimize religion and its adherents until the truth became clear: religion is a parasite that plagues the human […]
The religious Left is tired of being marginalized. In recent months, several faith leaders have redoubled their efforts to create a meaningful movement that can undermine the religious Right and oppose President Trump’s agenda. Reverend William J. Barber II is at the forefront of these efforts. The Evangelical pastor holds liberal views on gay and […]
In April, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat wrote a column arguing — appropriately for a Sunday opinion piece — that liberals need to go to church. More specifically, he argued: “The wider experience of American politics suggests that as liberalism de-churches it struggles to find a nontransactional organizing principle, a persuasive language of the common good.” […]
In the 2017 edition of The State of the Bible, its annual survey, the American Bible Society reports that more than half of all Americans who regularly read the Bible now search for related material on the Internet. This shift in how the faithful learn about scripture has resulted in unprecedented public exposure to one particular […]
My name is Robert Oscar Lopez. I am a professor at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and I bring a message: Keep the Church of England safe. The resolution GS 2070A, put forward by Jayne Ozanne of Oxford, would bring disaster upon millions in the Anglican Union. It asks the church to endorse a disputable […]
Aday after a Religion News Service interview portrayed retired pastor and author Eugene Peterson as shifting to endorse same-sex marriage, the evangelical leader retracted his comment and upheld the traditional Christian stance instead. “To clarify, I affirm a biblical view of marriage: one man to one woman. I affirm a biblical view of everything,” he […]
