****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-THIS WEBSITE IS NO LONGER ACTIVE****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!

Regardless of the activity on the Mall this weekend or the inactivity on the Mall in the days after, the question before us still remains: Who do we want to be as a people and as a nation? Do we want to go back, or do we want to move forward? Do we want to erase the steps we struggled to take in the ’60s by gutting or repealing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the 14th Amendment, the Fair Housing Act, and other progressive measures? I say, we have suffered too long and struggled too hard to turn back now. As a nation and as a people, we cannot, and we must not go back.

Eid al-Fitr, a joyous holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, this year falls around Sept. 11. Muslim leaders fear that their gatherings for prayer and festivities could be misinterpreted by those unfamiliar with Islam as a celebration of the 2001 terrorist strikes.

The leaders of the proposed Islamic community center and mosque near New York’s ground zero are addressing their critics by vowing to be open and transparent as the project progresses.

‘Creation of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome’ is the title of the paper. It was published in the prestigious journal Science and came out of the Craig Venter Institute. Venter is the scientist whose name always comes connected to the word ‘maverick’; he’s the one who first made his name by bringing big private dollars into molecular biotechnology to compete with the federal government and speed up the sequencing of the first human genome (that is, the determination of the identity and order of all the billions of DNA base pairs in one human). The title here is certainly in keeping with Venter’s bodaciousness.

Canadians familiar with North America’s largest oil pipeline operation, Enbridge Inc., say they are not surprised that the company has spilled oil again.

Progressive faith activists are on the march this summer, challenging the misperceived monopoly of conservatives who for far too long have tried to establish themselves as the sole guardians of faith, morality, and values.

“Our government is incapable of getting us out of this situation,” Nicholas said. “I hope the international community can keep our hope alive, because it’s fading.”

A federal court in Boston ruled last week that same-sex married couples deserve federal recognition. That case, along with another in California, is likely to move the battle closer to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mercy is the missing factor in our ever-stranger political debates about immigration, health care, joblessness, financial reform and local government budgets. A nation founded on mercy — as shown in religious tolerance, in a Bill of Rights, in a Civil War fought to end slavery, in an open door to “huddled masses” and in the Marshall Plan — seems to have decided that mercy is no longer affordable. Or even necessary.

UNITED NATIONS – A long outstanding proposal to recognize the right to water as a basic universal human right is threatening to split the world’s rich and poor nations.

An atheist South Park writer investigates the Lord’s Resistance Army and emerges with some unlikely heroes…

Every year for the past decade, more than 200 suspected illegal immigrants have died crossing the U.S.-Mexican border into Arizona. That’s roughly half of all such immigrants who die in the U.S., according to the U.S. Border Patrol and a 2009 American Civil Liberties Union study.
Anderson’s job is to get their bodies – or what is left of them – back to their families.

We live in a new era, marked by an aging and declining Christian right that is increasingly eclipsed by the Tea Party, a nascent but growing chorus of diverse progressive religious voices, and a broadening of political agendas among many people of faith. Maybe it’s time to rethink our assumptions about religious Americans and public policy.

Any student of theology can fall in love with the World Cup. And every four years, football fans like me annoy everyone around them by speaking endlessly of the World Cup as the most momentous of religious events.

President Obama’s recent announcement of his intent to nominate the Rev. Dr. Suzan D. Johnson Cook, or Dr. Sujay, as she is known on the “circuit,” as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, was soft news in a busy news week. But despite the lack of attention to what should be a critical diplomatic post, the nomination speaks volumes about the President’s proclivity for flash rather than substance in religious matters.

In a bow to the growing diversity of America’s religious landscape, the Claremont School of Theology, a Christian institution with long ties to the Methodist Church, will add clerical training for Muslims and Jews to its curriculum this fall, to become, in a sense, the first truly multi-faith American seminary.

The truth is, we did not get to this place overnight, or sixty days ago when this started. We arrived at this point of helplessness when technology began to overrun our ability to put it within the context of our moral and religious foundations.

Marrapodi maintains that audiences have always wanted more religion news, but mainstream journalists are sometimes reluctant to cover it as an issue in and of itself.