Theology
When I went to check my post office box after Thanksgiving, among the pile of mail waiting for me were review copies of Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great about Christianity and Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.
I first [...]
The denomination which I am now seeking to enter and belong to, the Episcopal Church, is a denominaton that many others are now seeking to depart.
Such a situation carries within it two things: danger and opportunity. The danger is self evident. The opportunty will come from listening to the jackhammer on our roof. The image of a hammer on the roof comes from my Bishop Greg Rickel. I've added "jack" to the "hammer" to note the severity of [...]
Last week, a Liberty University student asked Gov. Mike Huckabee to account for his recent surge in the polls. "There's only one explanation for it, and it is not a human one," Huckabee claimed, "It is the same power that helped a little boy with two fishes and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people. And that's the only way our campaign could be doing what it is doing." In other words, God apparently wants Mike Huckabee to be president-or, at the very least, win the Iowa caucuses. And, [...]
Tuesday evening, Virginia Lohmann Bauman was ordained to the ministry at First Baptist Church in Granville, Ohio. Gini (as we know her) is Sojourners' Ohio Field Organizer. In her ordination paper for the American Baptist Churches, Gini wrote:
My faith journey began in my childhood and continues to evolve in wonderful and challenging ways. I am a preacher's kid, a wife, a mother, a lawyer, a mediator, a minister, an ecumenical [...]
Last weekend my wife Amy and I were in Baltimore and attended Joel Osteen's event. Joel pastors the largest church in America with more than 38,000 people, and his latest book has already hit number one on many bestseller lists. Joel is selling out stadiums across the country preaching a gospel of healing, victory, promotion, and increase to people filled with sickness, defeat, depression, and [...]
Is it a sin to build a nuclear weapon? That question is becoming more and more central to the church debate on nuclear weapons, as two of the three largest denominations in the country took actions this spring that called into question the possession of nuclear weapons for deterrence.
Since 1945 deterrence in its various forms has been the philosophical cornerstone of the nuclear arms race. Each new U.S. weapon system through the years has been necessary, we were told, to maintain a credible deterrent against the Soviet threat. Variations and refinements of the theme, from "massive retaliation" to "flexible response," provided an excuse for even the most threatening and provocative advances in nuclear technology. The doctrine of deterrence has long provided the rationale for basing our entire defense policy on the insane threat of mass annihilation.
During the past six years, however, an important shift has occurred in the churches' stance toward nuclear weapons. In addition to the witness of communities of faith and resistance and the faithful stance of the historic peace churches, virtually every denomination in the United States has come out with a statement condemning the unrelenting arms race.
Yet until this year the mainstream church bodies in this country have not questioned the philosophy of deterrence. While church statements have raised moral questions about the use of nuclear weapons, the possession of nuclear weapons as part of a strategy of deterrence has been seen as a morally permissible evil. Churches have criticized everything about the arms race except the existence of nuclear weapons themselves.