****YOU HAVE REACHED THIS WEBSITE IN ERROR
-THIS WEBSITE IS NO LONGER ACTIVE****
PLEASE OPEN A NEW WINDOW
AND GO TO OUR NEW WEBSITE AT

WWW.PROGRESSIVECHRISTIANITY.ORG 
THANK YOU!

Of the thousands of white activists who headed South, nearly half were Jewish, according to “Jewish Dimensions of Social Justice,” a 1998 publication of the Reform movement.
“This was living out what Judaism itself has been teaching all along, that you have to help the oppressed, the underprivileged, not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor,” said Rabbi David Teitelbaum, 84, of Redwood City, Calif.

No one who truly understands “the sensitivity and sacred nature” of the Holocaust would deliberately and grotesquely mischaracterize the experience of a 13-year-old Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non-Jewish family to keep him alive. Many other Jews survived the attempted extermination of the Jewish people by changing their identities and hiding with Righteous Gentiles. With today’s falsehoods, Beck has engaged in a form of Holocaust revisionism.

Buddhists, says HH the Dalai Lama, aren’t asked to believe anything that’s not in accord with reason and experience.

In the big day after, experts across Washington – including many in the religious world — are trying to figure out exactly what happened in last night’s election. To help make a little sense of it all, the polling gurus at Washington Post have a few interesting tidbits to share from their Religion tabs – national.xls. A more detailed version Religion tabs – v2.xls.

If the fear of a broken society is, at its deepest level, the fear of a broken foundation myth—a loss of the sense of secure identity that once came from simply living on American soil—then no party is to blame for it and no party can fix it.

…the trend toward greater income inequality has been apparent since the early 1980s — the decade when Gordon Gekko, a fictional character in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” first extolled the virtues of greed.
History — even fairly recent history — is not America’s strong suit. We ignore it at our own peril.

HELENA, Mont. – At a time when gays have been gaining victories across the country, the Republican Party in Montana still wants to make homosexuality illegal.

…. Many of these migrants, overwhelmed by the heat, rough terrain, and lack of water, can’t make it. They often come poorly prepared, unable to carry enough water and sometimes wearing little more on their feet than sandals. The Sonoran Desert is filled with cacti and brush that tear apart feet, rocks and crevices that twist ankles—especially in the dark when most of the migrants travel. Sometimes a guide will lead a group. Anyone, injured or otherwise, who can’t keep up is frequently left behind.

Progressive religion is being called now to bear witness, and to claim solidarity with people who lose their lives in service of others. This ground must not be ceded.

Amid U.S. election fever, wacky pastors, and assorted other events, it’s easy to miss the momentous opening of the U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals. It happens on September 20 in New York, as about 150 heads of state and others converge on the United Nations for the annual shebang of the General Assembly. New York is always a chaotic scene when the General Assembly meets. But there’s a special challenge for 2010.

For the past few months, I’ve been doing some research in New York newspapers on the anti-Catholic vitriol the Irish faced in the nineteenth century. It’s been hard to avoid noticing how similar those attacks are to the biting comments being made against Islam and the backers of a Muslim community center proposed for a lower Manhattan building near the World Trade Center site.

Dove World Outreach pastor Terry Jones’ threatened Qur’an-burning has received a disproportionate amount of media attention, including hand wringing about whether there should be media attention given to small time pastors who use such tactics precisely to gain such media attention. And yet the lightning speed at which the threat, the negotiations, and the withdrawal of the threat occurred suggests another level of complexity to the iconography of the book which may be new.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips ruled that the policy, which bans the military from asking about a service member’s sexual orientation but requires the discharge of those who admit to being homosexual, violates service members’ First Amendment free-speech rights and their Fifth Amendment due process rights.

Palin’s event, combined with Glenn Beck’s non-political political rally, raise flags with respect to faith-based groups’ exemption from non-discrimination regulations. The insistent rhetoric suggests that some high-profile conservatives may be positioning themselves to receive public dollars for activities that are only non-political by the narrowest possible definition. At the very same time some religious right leaders have been crying “foul” at the use of taxpayer dollars to fund activities they oppose.

When people discuss the rights of lesbians and gays in contemporary U.S. culture, and across religious denominations, the abbreviation “LGBT” is used as a shorthand: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender. But are transgender people really being taken into account? What’s the state of the struggle, where transpeople are concerned?

Barack Obama’s pledge to shut down Guantanamo Bay will not be honoured until at least a year after the President’s self-imposed deadline – and may not be completed in his first administration.

The Pew Hispanic Center, which conducts stellar research on everything from health care to religion, released a report today quantifying just how many children are born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. The report comes in the midst of a campaign by some Republicans to hold congressional hearings on whether children born to illegal immigrants should automatically become citizens.

Which religion has proved the most violent and destructive in U.S. history? The answer should not be a surprise.