This post mashes up a lot of things, including descriptions of violence, genocide, religious hatred, and religious apathy; literature and Christian hermeneutics; and mild spoilers for the new movie Noah (2014, Darren Aronofsky and Ari Mendel). Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the film yet and still intend to. Also don’t read if you’ve been struggling with […]
Guest Post: Adventists Discussing LGBTI Exclusion
Guest post via Seventh-day Adventist Kinship International During its spring meeting tomorrow, the General Conference Executive Committee will consider newly proposed “guidelines” to exclude LGBTI people from membership in local congregations, Spectrum Magazine reports. (The Spectrum comment section is now thick and over 130 responses long; we don’t recommend you trawl through it.) The document before […]
A Few Words on World Vision USA
“The quest for doctrinal purity & the exclusion it necessarily brings about is the very definition of missing the point.” —Carla Jo, 3/27/2014 There’s been a lot of e-ink given over to World Vision USA this week. I’ve had no personal dealings with this organization, though I’ve known of the work other World Vision branches […]
Olive Hemmings, Richard Rice on Ordination & Interpretation
Black women have always comprised anywhere between 65 and 90 percent of membership in black [US] churches — institutions where they are largely excluded from the religious polity… Religion that began in slave communities is the only ancestral tie American-born blacks have to something like a family tree. But black churches, like many of their white […]
Reader Review #6: Listening Edition
Instead of my standard round-up of general news, articles, and media, this week’s Reader Review focuses on an international summit on sexuality and gender that the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church is hosting in Cape Town, South Africa. The summit began this morning, and the Adventist Review quotes co-organizer Pardon Mwansa: “The quality of meetings is […]
Raise a Fist: On Saluting the Humane
Real peace is more than the absence of war. Rather, we need to change the culture, situations, and systems that lead to violence. —American Friends Service Committee Five years ago I’m sitting behind the bar of a House of Representatives committee room, Washington, D.C. It’s a mark up day, when the committee meets to comment […]