The Dove World Outreach Center (the name’s a bit ironic, considering they only have 80 members) in Gainesville is going to have to pay taxes on a portion of their property because it seems they lease out part of it to a for-profit business. Think of all the possible commercial operations a church could set up.
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Anti-Islamic Gainesville Church Has a Furniture Store Out Back
It’s always interesting to see what stories reporters jump on and which are ignored. This has actually been a good year for coverage of changes in religious affiliation , thanks to some major studies on the matter. Here’s a CNN piece headlined “Study: Young Americans less religious than their parents,” for instance
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What does religious loyalty look like?
Long ago, when I was the religion-beat reporter and columnist for the Rocky Mountain News (please pause for a moment of silence), I thought that one of the most interesting stories in town was the growth of the local congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church. This was the 1980s and AIDS was a topic that dominated the news and bled over into all kinds of different subjects, including — obviously — religion
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Chip off the old mainline?
It’s a tough category, to be sure, but Lona O’Connor wins the prize for the worst story I’ve ever seen about female, non-Roman Catholic priests. It ran in the Palm Beach Post and it’s just absolutely embarrassing from top to bottom. Here’s the lede, which I do not believe is satire: Like the first Christians, they are outcasts
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Serving outrage soup for female priests
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert early this evening signed an extradition warrant that will send polygamous church leader Warren S
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Utah governor signs extradition request for cult leader Warren Jeffs
SUMMERVILLE — Supporters say the request was benign enough: Open a town meeting room for an hour each week so a group can pray for the community, its government and its churches.
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Request for prayer site stirs debate
Paul Harvey Don’t miss our contributor Christopher Jones’s piece over at Juvenile Instructor : ” ‘ Owned by the White People’: America and Native Americans in Church History Sunday School Lessons, 1934. ” Going through some boxes of old material while packing and moving, Chris reflects on Mormon providentialist interpretations, as communicated in Sunday School lessons, on the founding of America, and on relations with Native peoples. Some of it is kind of standard-issue stuff for that period: heroic and virtuous Pilgrims, God preparing the way for the coming of our Christian civilization, and so on.
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Owned by the White People
We’re taking a break from polemics for a real treat. Here is a true story from a new friend of ours here at ABD, who is going by the name of “Ray.” He wants to share his story with you in the hopes that you will find something to relate to, that you might be strengthened and come to share in his hope in the love of Jesus Christ
Excerpt from:
Reader Testimonies — Ray
Marriage as exactly one woman and one man is an “ideal,” writes Ross Douthat , trying his best to frame up a coherent, non-shrieking, last-gasp defense of legalized inequality. Fair enough — let’s suppose it is an ideal
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The Proof from Diorama
Paul Harvey We’ve had a number of posts here in the past where folks have reflected on their experiences researching in various archives. One of my most enjoyable was a couple of weeks years ago at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane, where I dipped a bit into the massive archives of the American Missionary Association, the Congregationalist enterprise which after the Civil War was heavily involved in education for the freedpeople. At the time of this research, I was thinking of a good deal of the literature on postwar black education, leading to “industrial” schools; that literature focused on missionary paternalism.
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Education for Liberation: The American Missionary Association from Reconstruction through Civil Rights