by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
Far fewer British people agree with vitriolic assertions about religion. Still, disbelief in God is on the rise in both the UK and the US.
“I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate,” Richard Dawkins said in 1996 to the American Humanist Association. Ten years later, in 2006, a ComRes poll found that 42 percent of UK adults agreed with this vitriolic statement. That is, two in five were not just nonbelievers; they thought all belief in God should be deliberately snuffed out.
This was near the height of the New Atheism movement—an angry, bombastic form of anti-religion that arose in the early 2000s. New Atheist leaders garnered millions from best-selling books and gained an influential following. At the time, it seemed that this would become the permanent state of secularism—that a lack of belief in God was necessarily joined with a bitter, trollish contempt for religion.
But things began to change. By 2015, some had begun to announce the death of New Atheism, and in 2020, 15 years after the ComRes poll, a new survey showed that only 20 percent of adults in the UK agreed that religious faith could be compared to an evil and intractable plague on society.
Nick Spencer—senior fellow at Theos, a Christian thinktank in the UK, and one of the coauthors of the new report—said the New Atheism era spawned an unprecedented scale of animosity against religion in the general public. But he concluded in a 2022 Theos report on science and religion that “the angry hostility towards religion engineered by the New Atheist movement is over,” with the UK public expressing a more balanced view of religion than during the height of New Atheist influence. Among the streams of contemporary nonbelief, more nuanced forms are on the rise.
As the New …
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by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
“Sensitive” types like me won’t always mesh with more intimidating activists. But we need each other to thrive.
In almost every nonprofit or social enterprise job I’ve had, at least one coworker terrified me. There was the boss who gave unexpectedly negative feedback on my performance review. There was the director who had sudden, inexplicable outbursts of anger and frustration. There was the colleague who asked pointed questions, one after another, staring at me intensely and unrelentingly until I responded. There was the manager who frequently sent angry emails in ALL CAPS, punctuated with rows of exclamation marks.
Not surprisingly, I had a hard time working with these individuals. They caused me intense stress and anxiety. Yet in hindsight, I find that I deeply value those colleagues. I appreciate the ways in which they pushed me beyond what was comfortable and the ways I grew as a result.
In any discussion about sensitives and empaths like myself, it is easy to focus on the negative aspects of being around those who aren’t like us. And while it is vital to set boundaries with toxic people in your life—including in social justice work—it’s also healthy to create space for “nonsensitive” peers who genuinely care about you and the social good. They may come across as prickly or aggressive, but they also bring many gifts to the table.
My nonsensitive colleagues have wowed me time and again with their confidence, persistence, resilience, and risk-taking. They are willing to fight the battles that I can’t, taking on the adversaries I would sooner run away from. They aren’t afraid to say hard truths or challenge long-held assumptions. They see and pursue opportunities that intimidate me. They help me to see what’s possible, and their efforts amplify my own.
Social justice work …
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by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
The newly accredited school promotes a theological education that’s not at odds with culture.
Much of Terry LeBlanc’s adult life has been driven by one question: Can you be fully Indigenous and fully a follower of Jesus?
His answer has been a resounding yes.
Over the past three decades, he and others have built a seminary to offer theological education to Indigenous people in the United States, Canada, and the world, so that they can answer yes too.
NAIITS, previously known as the North American Institute of Indigenous Theological Studies, was founded in 2000 with a vision of seeing “men and women journey down the road of a living heart relationship with Jesus in a transformative way which does not require the rejection of their Creator-given social and cultural identity.” In 2021, it became the first Indigenous school to receive full accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools. NAIITS can now offer accredited master of arts, master of theological studies, and master of divinity degrees, as well as doctorates in Indigenous Christian theology.
Last year, NAIITS received two grants worth $6 million from Lilly Endowment to do just that. The school will use $1 million to develop a master’s program in trauma-informed spiritual care. The other $5 million will go toward creating the Canadian Learning Community for Decolonization and Innovation, a collaborative project with four other universities.
LeBlanc, who is Mi’kmaq-Acadian and holds a PhD from Asbury Theological Seminary, said NAIITS teaches people how to reimagine the relationship between faith and culture. The academic term is decolonization, which LeBlanc said doesn’t mean diminishing the power of Jesus or the gospel, but making space for Indigenous perspectives and learning to see Indigenous identity and culture as …
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by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
As the toll of overdoses continue to rise, congregations provide recovery, medical care, and redemption.
It was the prayer requests that caught the new minister’s attention. Not long after Lisa Bryant arrived at the Madam Russell United Methodist Church, a historic congregation named for one of the original pioneers in Saltville, Virginia, she began to notice the repetition. The same underlying problem kept rearing up in the needs she heard.
“I got phone calls from some members: ‘Please pray for my grandson, he’s on drugs again,’” she said. “Or someone’s niece would get arrested again.”
Drugs—methamphetamines, oxycontin, heroin, fentanyl—were hiding everywhere in the prayers of the people.
The town of just 2,000 people in southwestern Virginia had almost nothing to help those struggling with addiction. The nearest recovery group was an hour’s drive away. Residential rehab facilities were even farther—out of reach of anyone without a decent income and reliable transportation, which is a lot of people in that part of the country. So Bryant believed that the church, in the Wesleyan spirit of doing all the good you can for all the people you can, could start a recovery group.
It shouldn’t be too hard, she thought. Churches have been hosting 12-step meetings across the country for decades.
She brought the idea to the church council: They should launch a program to help people in Saltville deal with the opioids crisis ravaging the region.
“Everybody was quiet,” Bryant told CT, recalling the moment from five years ago. “Then one guy spoke up and said, ‘We don’t really have that problem here. That doesn’t pertain to us.’”
“Really?” she asked, stunned to tears. “It’s all around us. You …
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by | Aug 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
The particularities of people groups can aid the work of understanding and proclaiming the gospel.
The worldwide growth of Christianity has brought about a flowering of theological perspectives. Yet many Western theologians have little familiarity with theologians working in non-Western contexts. Stephen T. Pardue, a professor at the Asia Graduate School of Theology, addresses this problem in a new book, Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church. J. Nelson Jennings, editor of the journal Global Missiology, spoke with Pardue about the blessings of engaging with majority-world theologians.
You grew up in the United States, but you’ve spent many years living and teaching in the Philippines. How has that background shaped your thinking on theology and the global church?
Like most culturally hybrid people, I couldn’t possibly trace all the intricacies of how I’ve been shaped. One of my joys in writing the book was getting to reflect on these complex realities, which often get either ignored or oversimplified in theological books. In my own book, I try to move beyond these simplifications—for example, speaking of “Eastern” and “Western” theologies as if all theologians within these categories think the same way. I hope readers will feel invited to consider how the cultural plurality of God’s people helps us hear the Good News more fully.
Why, to invoke your book title, does evangelical theology need the global church?
We need the input of the whole church to thrive. This means not just celebrating the church’s growing diversity for vague reasons of politeness or political correctness, but developing a coherent framework for how culture can inform our theology without undermining its primary focus: the triune God revealed in Scripture.
One of my big themes is that …
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