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The letter was published May 6 in the wake of a video of Patterson making objectifying comments about a teenage girl in a 2014 sermon and the surfacing of an audio recording of Patterson advising victims of domestic violence not to divorce their spouses.
But since the 2016 meeting, many of its smaller U.S. jurisdictions and regional bodies, called annual conferences, have made their own decisions regarding LGBT clergy. Last year, the Mountain Sky Conference elected Karen Oliveto, a married lesbian, as the denomination’s first openly LGBT bishop.
In today’s model, sanctuary functions as a safety valve, a moral check on the state’s pursuit of its own narrow economic and political interests. An increasingly secular state is therefore a driving force behind the practice of sanctuary. Yet the Catch-22 is that a too-secular society will no longer honor the sanctity of the house of worship. Effective church sanctuary, then, rests on a knife’s edge: It requires a Goldilocks zone in which a society is just inhumane enough to ignore the suffering of vulnerable strangers, rendering sanctuary necessary, but just humane enough to refrain from violating the sanctity of its faith communities, rendering sanctuary ineffectual. Not every country in the world exists in that Goldilocks zone.
Portman’s protest touched a raw nerve not just because of who she is – a world-famous Jewish celebrity and a well-known supporter of Israel – but also because of whom she is seen to represent. Her outspoken opposition to Netanyahu has been portrayed as typical of her generation of young American Jews whose attitudes toward Israel tend to be more critical than that of their parents and grandparents.
The White House said those working on the initiative will provide policy recommendations from faith-based and community programs on “more effective solutions to poverty” and inform the administration of “any failures of the executive branch to comply with religious liberty protections under law.”
“The vast number of Muslims say being an American is important to how they think of themselves,” said Dalia Mogahed, director of research at the ISPU. “They also say that being a Muslim is important to how they think of themselves. When you look at those identity factors, they’re actually mutually reinforcing — meaning, if you have a higher Muslim identity, you are actually more likely to have a stronger American identity. They’re not in competition.”
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and organizations promoting atheism, agnosticism, and humanism announced the creation this week of the first Congressional Freethought Caucus.
A crowd of thousands of angry, shouting protesters gathered as his body, covered by a sheet, was carried on a makeshift stretcher along dirt streets to the presidential palace, a Reuters witness said.
It has been called the "Teachers' Spring" in the United States, with educators from five states staging an unprecedented wave of protests demanding increases in pay and school budgets.
"I'm nervous. I'm afraid," said Linda Sonigo, 40, walking solemnly toward the U.S. gate with her two-year-old granddaughter in her arms. "I'm afraid they'll separate us," she said, motioning to her two children and grandchild.
James H. Cone, the scholar known as the “founder of black liberation theology,” died April 28, Union Theological Seminary announced. He was 79.
Moon greeted Kim at the military demarcation line where the men smiled and shook hands. In an unplanned move, Kim invited Moon to step briefly across into North Korea, before the two leaders crossed back into South Korea holding hands.
A former administrator for the women's basketball team at Temple University, Cosby's alma mater, Constand is one of about 50 women who have accused him of sexual assault. All of the other allegations are believed to be too old to be prosecuted.
R. Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, said that the Assemblies of God, founded in 1914, has had a “fascinating history” of women’s leadership, with women leading congregations and speaking from pulpits in its early days and later often finding their roles restricted.
“DACA’s rescission was arbitrary and capricious because the Department failed adequately to explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful,” Bates wrote in his opinion statement released Tuesday. “Neither the meager legal reasoning nor the assessment of litigation risk provided by DHS to support its rescission decision is sufficient to sustain termination of the DACA program.”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday debated whether new congressional districts drawn up in Texas constitute “racial gerrymandering” because they intentionally dilute the voting blocs of new Latino and black residents, a case that could have a lasting effect on how electoral districts are drawn.
Described by Christopher Mathias of the Huffington Post as "the most aggressive over-policing [he has] ever seen," images circulating on Twitter showed heavily armed police officers pointing weapons at seemingly unarmed counterprotesters.
"America, keep your peace. You don't know how precious it is and how terrible is war."
A coalition of faith leaders took to the steps of the Interior Department April 19 to ask Secretary Ryan Zinke to curb methane leaks at natural gas drilling sites. Notably, the group included a representative from the evangelical community.
This year Dr. Cone received the 2018 Grawemeyer Award for Religion from Louisville Presbyterian Seminary for the The Cross and the Lynching Tree which “passionately conjoins the provocative images of the first century cross and the twentieth-century lynching tree.” As he writes, “Both are symbols of the death of the innocent, mob hysteria, humiliation, and terror. They both also reveal a thirst for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning and demonstrate that God can transform ugliness into beauty, into God’s liberating presence.” His theological memoir, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, will be published this October by Orbis.