Religion

  • Unlikely Disciples and Damned Lies

    Unlikely Disciples and Damned Lies

    Robert Joustra

    November 3, 2011

    Old news, since the book was published in 2009 and rides that parallel wave of the demolition of the religious right, and outpouring of memoirs and essays of burned activists, smoking for revenge. But Barbara Kay gets it wrong when she says there is a problem with Christ on campus—not just because it's an old news fight, but because she extends the logic of Liberty to all evangelicals, everywhere.

    The Unlikely Discipline: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, a study of Liberty University in Virginia, has sat on my night stand for about three months, and I have made only the most half-hearted attempts to read through it. The few...

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  • Zoning out religion

    Zoning out religion

    Peter Stockland

    November 2, 2011

    The Montreal woman was back in front of a judge yesterday to fight a ticket she received for participating in an "illegal Mass" at a rented facility in the borough of Lachine. But the case was put over until February 22, 2012 when Celani's lawyer will argue the ticket is invalid because it is an abuse of a zoning bylaw and, more importantly, because it violates her Charter rights. In the interim, Celani engaged a Montreal constitutional lawyer to argue the case, at least in part on Charter grounds. She acknowledged after her appearance on Tuesday that her reflex was to simply pay the $144 fine and settle the matter. Then she got mad, and the madder she got, the more she became determined to fight.

    Paula Celani's day in court has become a six-month legal odyssey.

    The Montreal woman was back in front of a judge yesterday to fight a ticket she received for participat...

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  • The New York Times' (and America's) Rejection of Faith

    The New York Times' (and America's) Rejection of Faith

    Brian Dijkema

    October 20, 2011

    The article, written by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens, covers much of the ground previously covered by Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The charges are familiar to many in the evangelical world: evangelicals reject science and are marked by "simplistic theology, cultural isolationism, and stubborn anti-intellectualism" and a sub-culture which is parasitic on the mainstream of American life. The only reason it's in the NYT is that it flatters the prejudices of the readersip. A more nuanced view of evangelicals, like the one Alan Wolfe wrote for The Atlantic some years ago, would never be run in the NYT.

    The New York Times published an article this week opining on the evangelical rejection of reason.

    The article, written by Karl Giberson and Randal...

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  • Keeping Public Faith in Perspective

    Keeping Public Faith in Perspective

    Ray Pennings

    October 19, 2011

    Faith convictions and affiliations have long been considered fair fodder in American politics. In the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama's relationship with his pastor Jeremiah Wright was a major media and political focus. The question of whether Milt Romney's Mormonism makes him unelectable haunted his campaign both in 2008 as well as presently. Michelle Bachman, a long-time Lutheran, appears to have changed churches just before launching her Presidential bid, supposedly to avoid association with the publicly controversial positions the earlier church had taken. The religious association of American political candidates seems to matter for them all.

    Anita Perry's outburst last week that her husband, an outspoken evangelical running for the Republican Presidential nomination, was being "brutalized" by his political opponents "because of his faith" is a bit difficult to make sense of. Governor Perry is ...

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