Faith

From an article of the same title by Stephanie Simon in the LA Times:

With a pivotal election five weeks away, leaders on the religious right have launched an all-out drive to get Christians from pew to voting booth. Their target: the nearly 30 million Americans who attend church at least once a week but did not vote in 2004. Their efforts at times push legal limits on church involvement in partisan campaigns. That is by design. With control of Congress at stake Nov. 7, those guiding the movement say they owe it to God and to their own moral principles to do everything they can to keep social conservatives in power... The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical in Texas, has recruited 5,000 "patriot pastors" nationwide to promote an agenda that aligns neatly with Republican platforms. "We urge them to avoid legal entanglement, but there are times in a pastor's life when he needs to take a biblical stand," Scarborough said. "Our higher calling is to Christ." The campaign encourages individual pastors to use sermons, Bible studies and rallies to drive Christians to the polls - and, by implication or outright endorsement, to Republican candidates. One online guide to discussing the election in church, produced by the Focus on the Family ministry, offers this tip: If a congregant says her top concerns are healthcare and national security, suggest that Jesus would make abortion and gay marriage priorities. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson told a crowd of 3,000 that it would be "downright frightening" if Republicans lost control of Congress. If there's a good Christian on the ballot, he said, failing to vote "would be a sin." The law restricting political activity of churches and charities dates to 1954, when then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson pushed it through in a pique of anger over a nonprofit's effort to derail his reelection. Tax-exempt organizations, including churches, may not participate or intervene in political campaigns on behalf of any candidate. Intervention is broadly defined as "any and all activities that favor or oppose one or more candidate for public office," according to the Internal Revenue Service. That sounds straightforward. In practice, though, there are many ways around the restriction, as the faithful recognize.

Did Dobson really say that? Failing to vote for a Christian "would be a sin"? It wouldn't be the first time (see the profile by Michael Crowley titled "James Dobson. The religious right's new kingmaker" on Slate.com from a couple years ago). Dobson has probably done a ton of good in his career, but at the moment he seems to have lost it...calling it a sin to not vote for a Christian...erecting road blocks in the way of AIDS funding.

I like the One Year Bible where each day you read a passage from the OT, one from the NT, one from Psalms, and one from Proverbs. I like the idea of reading the Bible from cover to cover each year but not getting bogged down in certain parts of the OT for weeks at a time. That's why I like the One Year Bible because it gives you a variety each day. Anyway, I've wished I had it in mp3 format so I could put it on the iPod and listen to it each day in the car. Well, I found a podcast here. I"m not sure which translation it is, but it's a modern one. It has some commentary that I could do without, but all-in-all I'm glad to have found it.

As you've probably heard, the pope stirred up a hornet's nest with comments about Islam. Roger McShane's Today's Papers column in Slate provides a nice summary of events and drips with irony:

The pope's suggestion that compulsion and violence are inherent features of Islam has outraged the Muslim world. In Afghanistan, where apostates are subject to execution, the parliament and the Foreign Ministry demanded an apology. In Yemen, where religious conversion is punishable by death, the president has threatened to sever diplomatic ties. In the West Bank, Palestinians attacked four churches with guns and firebombs. And a Somali cleric added his two cents: "Whoever offends our Prophet Muhammad should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim."

Andrew Sullivan analyzed the pope's comments (here, here, and here) and linked to the transcript. Other papal comments also made the news. From an article by Tracy Wilkinson in the LA Times titled "Pontiff Admonishes Catholics Not to Lose Their Souls to Science":

Under glorious skies in this Bavarian capital where he once lived, Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday warned Roman Catholics against letting modern concerns drown out God's word, adding that technology alone could not solve the world's problems. An overreliance on science has made too many Catholics deaf to the teachings of the church, the pope said in a homily that scolded Western European societies for an increasingly secular focus. Faith is needed to combat diseases such as AIDS, he said... "Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God -- there are too many different frequencies filling our ears," he said. "What is said about God strikes us as pre-scientific, no longer suited to our age."... "Social issues and the Gospel are inseparable," the pope said. "When we bring people only knowledge, ability, technical competence and tools, we bring them too little.

From an article of the same title by Cathy Lynn Grossman in USA Today:

The USA calls itself one nation under God, but Americans don't all have the same image of the Almighty in mind. A new survey of religion in the USA finds four very different images of God - from a wrathful deity thundering at sinful humanity to a distant power uninvolved in mankind's affairs. Forget denominational brands or doctrines or even once-salient terms like "Religious Right." Even the oft-used "Evangelical" appears to be losing ground. Believers just don't see themselves the way the media and politicians - or even their pastors - do, according to the national survey of 1,721 Americans, by far the most comprehensive national religion survey to date... Though 91.8% say they believe in God, a higher power or a cosmic force, they had four distinct views of God's personality and engagement in human affairs. These Four Gods - dubbed by researchers Authoritarian, Benevolent, Critical or Distant - tell more about people's social, moral and political views and personal piety than the familiar categories of Protestant/Catholic/Jew or even red state/blue state. For example: 45.6% of all Americans say the federal government "should advocate Christian values," but 74.5% of believers in an authoritarian God do. Sociologist Paul Froese says their survey finds the stereotype that conservatives are religious and liberals are secular is "simply not true. Political liberals and conservative are both religious. They just have different religious views."

There was also a nice summary in The Washington Post.

From an article of the same title by Caryle Murphy in The Washington Post:

[Brian] McLaren has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in an increasingly active group of progressive evangelicals who are challenging the theological orthodoxy and political dominance of the religious right. He also is an intellectual guru of "emerging church," a grass-roots movement among young evangelicals exploring new models of living out their Christian faith. Progressives, who range from 11 to 36 percent of all evangelicals, according to various polls, are still overshadowed by the Christian right among evangelicals. But the steady popularity of McLaren's books over the past eight years signals an expanding diversity of thought in this important political constituency. McLaren, 50, offers an evangelical vision that emphasizes tolerance and social justice. He contends that people can follow Jesus's way without becoming Christian. In the latest of his eight books, "The Secret Message of Jesus," which has sold 55,000 copies since its April release, he argues that Christians should be more concerned about creating a just "Kingdom of God" on earth than about getting into heaven. Along with such other progressive evangelicals as Washington-based anti-poverty activist Jim Wallis and educator Tony Campolo, McLaren is openly critical of the conservative political agenda favored by many evangelicals. "When we present Jesus as a pro-war, anti-poor, anti-homosexual, anti-environment, pro-nuclear weapons authority figure draped in an American flag, I think we are making a travesty of the portrait of Jesus we find in the gospels," McLaren said in a recent interview... What makes McLaren's ideas attractive to progressive evangelicals appalls the more numerous conservatives. Noting that he fails to condemn homosexuality, one conservative Web site called him "A True Son of Lucifer" for ignoring "absolute biblical truth." And last year, Baptists in Kentucky revoked a speaking invitation after McLaren said that followers of Jesus might not be the only ones to gain salvation. "If you have some person or movement coming along calling into question the non-negotiables of Christianity, then those who espouse Christianity find such a challenge dangerous," said Donald A. Carson, professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, who has criticized McLaren's theology... Emerging church" is a loose network of mostly young evangelicals who believe the Christian message needs to be made more relevant in a time of rapid technological and societal change, particularly to those who've never been part of any church. Participants refer to their interaction as a "conversation," much of which takes place on the Internet at sites such as http://www.emergentvillage.com and blogs such as pomomusings.com. "We are questioning a lot of presuppositions of conventional Christians: What should a church look like? How do we really understand Scripture in a modern context?" said Tony Jones, the conversation's national coordinator. "To conservatives, we seem like relativists, and to liberals, we seem like Jesus freaks."