Posts tagged Richard Ostling
Finding A Tax Definition To ‘When A Church Is Not A Church’

(ANALYSIS) That was the eye-catching headline for a 2019 article. Last month, the watchdog website Ministry Watch pursued its long-running concern that’s also raised in a September article by University of Notre Dame law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a tax expert.

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A New Look At The Status Of Women Across Global Christianity

(ANALYSIS) Before this month’s synod at the Vatican, Pope Francis took the question of allowing women deacons off the agenda, referring this and other hot-button issues to study groups. That distressed many Catholic activists. Leaving aside this matter of ordained ministry, sisters in religious orders and lay women could fill many influential church posts monopolized by male priests.

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Could These Schemes Save The American Newspaper Industry?

(ANALYSIS) A thumbsucker on the news business could review all those disheartening statistics about dying dailies and weeklies, declining ad and circulation income and shrinking newsroom staffs — all of which have escalated since the 21st century dawned.

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Could New Science Verify The Famous Shroud of Turin?

(ANALYSIS) The Shroud of Turin, the world’s most famous and most-examined artifact, is revered by devotees as the actual burial cloth that covered Jesus Christ’s body after his crucifixion. Many will consider that inconceivable, but is there reason to accept the claim? Or is this celebrated cloth merely a pious artwork, or a clever fraud, that originated in medieval times?

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New Polls Offer Conflicting Clues On Key Catholic Voters

(ANALYSIS) How Catholic voters view the candidates and issues could nudge margins enough to swing the election, and so could many other factors in such a nail-biter. Though political coverage emphasizes evangelicals, shifts by the two different Catholic segments are usually much more important in general elections. 

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When This Election Is Over, Time For Some Happiness

(ANALYSIS) For many Americans, it’s a challenge to focus on much news beyond the raucous national and local political campaigns till November 5. But late this year or early in 2025 we’ll get something completely different and fascinating — a batch of new findings from the Global Flourishing Study. Through 2026, this unprecedented academic project is investigating what factors create human happiness, well-being and life satisfaction in 22 widely varied countries, based upon surveys with 240,000 people. 

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Latter-Day Saints Come To Terms With The 126-Year Racial Barrier

(ANALYSIS) Extraordinary. That’s the word for “Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality,” a 2024 book-of-the-year candidate written by Colorado State University historian Matthew L. Harris. He analyzes the restrictions that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imposed upon members of Black African ancestry between 1852 and 1978, an issue that extended into the 21st century. 

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Harris, Walz And Shapiro: Election Faith Factors To Consider

(ANALYSIS) This extraordinary political year displays an increasingly multicultural America. Starting with Harris, she'd be the first Asian American to be president, the first with Hindu roots as signified by her name, the first female and first female African American. Despite Donald Trump’s feigned racial perplexity, her dual Black identity is equally obvious since she chose to attend Howard University and has been a member of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church for three decades.  

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Muckraking Is Biblical: Welcome To The Summer Of Exposés

(ANALYSIS) Why rake muck? For one thing, it’s biblical. Recall Scripture’s narratives about the venerated King David’s adultery and homicide or St. Peter’s multiple denials of Jesus Christ. It encourages healthy reflection on the forgiveness of sins, the ways power is misused, the dangers of celebrity worship, the ongoing impact of racial evil and the value in continually taking fresh looks at our own attitudes rather than remaining captive to the cultural assumptions in which we were born and raised.

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Educational Disputes With Religious Angles Central To GOP’s Agenda

(ANALYSIS) The lavish over-use of capital letters in the 2024 Republican Party platform, set for approval at this week’s Milwaukee convention, demonstrates that this is wholly a Donald Trump production. So does the Trumpublicans’ softened stance on abortion, which has dominated the news coverage.

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Complexities Abound In Unending Ten Commandments Disputes

(ANALYSIS) A Louisiana bill signed into law on June 19 requires displays of the Bible’s revered Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, even at the university level. Religious and nonreligious citizens immediately joined national lobbies in a federal court complaint that the law must be overturned for violating the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “establishment of religion” by the government. 

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Do Southern Baptists Now Qualify As Neo-Fundamentalists?

(ANALYSIS) The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention was as newsworthy as usual, but unusually significant. The Tennessean depicted the deliberations as “a turning point for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.” If so, will this turning turn out to be Southern Baptists’ migration toward neo-fundamentalism, a growing force within America’s complex evangelical movement?

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Keeping The Faith: Is The Rise Of Religious ‘Nones’ Stalling?

(ANALYSIS) In religion, what goes down can always come up again. American religions continue to face persistent skepticism from elite culture, education and entertainment along with long-term internal damage from sexual abuse scandals and disputes over sexual morality and Trumpism that are not disappearing. Also, stated identity in polls does not make up for sagging in-person attendance and donations that erode organized religion.

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Will Catholics Determine Whether Biden Or Trump Wins In ‘24?

A recent series of crosscurrents and eruptions remind us that Catholic voters may well decide this odd contest between unwelcome nominees. As with Americans in general, Pew Research Center polling shows they give fellow Catholic Biden an unfavorable rating of 64 percent and 57 percent unfavorable toward Trump. 

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Presbyterians’ Latest Sexuality Showdown Follows Methodists’ Historic Shift

(ANALYSIS) While drama with the United Methodist Church continues to develop, the sexuality spotlight shifts to America’s Presbyterian Church (U.S.A)., which has already approved gay clergy and marriage but is heading into a different sexuality fuss that carries some risk of another church split.

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Threat Or Myth?: The Unending Clamor Over Christian Nationalism

(ANALYSIS) Here are a few added observations to Religion Unplugged’s continued reporting this election year on vigorous agitation against “Christian Nationalism” as a threat to American democracy, with “White” often added to signal racial animus. This accompanies heavy breathing overall about fusing religion with politics in multiplied events, books, articles, Internet postings and broadcast punditry.

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Will The United Methodist Church Finally Settle Its Big Split?

(ANALYSIS) The UMC has just suffered America’s worst schism since the Civil War, with 7,658 traditionalist congregations, a quarter of the former total, departing as of New Year’s Eve. The Charlotte gathering will once again deal with the central problem that has plagued this prominent denomination for most of the 56 years since it was founded through a merger. 

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Behold: A World-Class Novelist Wrestles Anew With Biblical Genesis

(ANALYSIS) The American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has accumulated numerous literary prizes, among them the 2005 Pulitzer, but also honors in religion. Her new non-fiction book “Reading Genesis” wrestles with the grand themes and thorny issues raised in the Bible’s first book. It’s a climactic testament at the twilight of a distinguished life and career. 

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Historical Turning Point As American Jews’ ‘Golden Age’ Ends?

(ANALYSIS) The April issue of the ever-interesting Atlantic magazine features an 11,400-word blockbuster by staff writer Franklin Foer, a prominent Jewish journalist who was formerly editor of The New Republic. The provocative headline of his state-of-the-union assessment proclaims that “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.” Big — if true. 

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