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Christmas Eve: The Preacher’s Nightmare and Greatest Opportunity

Visit Bruce’s Site on Evolutionary Christianity This will be the first Christmas Eve in twenty-seven years that I’m not preaching. I confess to not feeling overwhelming grief. It’s a tough gig—almost impossible to pitch the message in …

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Diana Butler Extended Interview- PBS

“I think that people who are leaving church, or people who call themselves spiritual but not religious, are raising really significant questions about faith, about community life and about the future of religion that religious leaders should pay more attention to,” says religion scholar Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. Watch more of our interview with her about the religious implications of the rise of the religiously unaffiliated.

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Bedrock Christianity and Bedrock Americana

A Precarious Reflection for the Thanksgiving Holiday, 2012

That bedrock of Jesus’ teaching did however have implications as to how we might order our lives in society; in closer alignment with what those scriptures depict as something more akin to what the divine had in mind. As well as how we ought to treat one another, without vacuous pretence or self-embellishment.

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The Affliction of Affluence

Reconciling Gratitude, Generosity & Greed

The common dream most people have of one day having more than they already have seems to have remained as fleeting and elusive as ever. Meanwhile, the gross disparity and widening gap in this country between the haves and the have-nots has reached a point where an oligarchy of corporate interests posing as individuals shape public opinion and outspend each other as never before in partisan attempts to buy an election.

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Evangelical Christian blogger scolded for using word ‘vagina’ in book

Rachel Held Evans doesn’t want to talk about her vagina anymore. “I’m sorry,” said a spokesman for her publisher, Thomas Nelson, in turning down a request for an interview, “she’s a little uncomfortable continuing with this conversation.” …

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New Evangelical Partnership Releases “A Call to Christian Common Ground on Family Planning, and Maternal, and Children’s Health”

Worldwide, about 125 million women face social, emotional, and spiritual trauma – and for some, the life-threatening risk – of not having access to family planning. As a result, one in four births worldwide is unplanned, leading …

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Filmmaker asks whether hell is real, and who goes there

(RNS) It’s something that has haunted Kevin Miller ever since he became a Christian at age 9 at summer camp: hell.   Now 41, Miller says he has no idea what happens to people after death. But …

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Outgrowing Evangelicalism: It’s Not Just for Scholars Anymore

In July, Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay, posted on his website his experience of being a Christian, a  musician, and why he finds it hard–maybe more than just “hard”–to do that within the world of evangelicalism. The band’s in a studio …

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A Tower of Babble

Giving Voice to Intolerance in an Age of Pluralism

The back story to the Tower of Babel myth is that the orignial plans called for anything but babble. But where once humankind may have all spoken the same language with one unifying plan to build a place all could dwell and abide one another, it has long since ever been the case. “We live in a pluri-verse, not a uni-verse,” says Raimon Panikkar. Ours is a pluralistic age in which we have many different and opposing – even sometimes mutually incompatible — worldviews that threaten planetary human coexistence. In the midst of such chaos and confusion, how can we tolerate each other’s differences? Or, some might ask, should we even try? I consider myself a very tolerant person! The only people I cannot abide are ignorant and intolerant bigots! Does that make me intolerant as well, or merely principled? What would constitute a forbearance of principled intolerance, with a leniency of spirit? Here’s John Bennison’s latest Commentary from Words and Ways.

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Simultaneously Embracing the Magical, Mythical, Empirical, and Rational

‎Eric Elnes, Senior Pastor of Countryside Community Church (UCC), has begun thinking about what he sees as a “convergence” trajectory for post-evangelical Christians and postliberal Christians.  He thinks those two groups are moving toward one another from …

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What Should Churches Be About?

Whatever paradigm a community may favor (or more than one among community members), the core of Christian faith and what Jesus emphasized — the centrality of love in action — can be the community emphasis as well.

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Hellbound? Trailer

This is the official theatrical trailer for the documentary “Hellbound?”, which hits theaters across North America starting September 2012. For more information about the film, please visit hellboundthemovie.com.

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Hookers, Looters and Cheats, Part 4: The Looter Who Became Jesus’ New BFF

Skype Guest: Rev. Fred Plumer

Full Darkwood Brew show with President, Fred Plumer. Interviewed by Eric Elnes.

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Darkwood Byte with Rev. Fred Plumer

Eric Elnes of Darkwood Brew and Fred Plumer from ProgressiveChristianity.org discuss progressive Christianity and ideas of convergence.

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U.S. Still Religious, But Trust In Institutions Wanes

Something is happening when it comes to religion in America. Though more Americans go to church or believe in God than their counterparts in virtually every other Western country, fewer Americans now trust religious institutions. A recent Gallup …

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Win, Lose or Draw?

Jesus' Way of Confounding the Trophy-centric Ways of this World

The ancient Olympic games were a series of athletic competitions between city-states. The results determined who were the winners, and who were the losers. But during the games, any conflict between the warring states was forbidden. If ever there was a time when that Olympic torch should be lit and never be extinguished, perhaps this is it. But how? It seems international good sportsmanship inside the stadium can only be assured by heavy security on the outside; where unruly competing self-interests would seek to turn winning at all cost into a blood sport. The previous Words & Ways commentary explored a foolish kind of wisdom once espoused by a Galilean sage through his teaching, the parables he told, and even the seeming absurdity found in his miracles (see “The Foolishness of Jesus”). It is this same Jesus tradition that also proposes such counter-cultural notions that one can “win by losing,” and “the last shall be first.” Here’s John Bennison’s latest commentary from Words & Ways.

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Progressive Christianity and Emergence

Fred Plumer, President of ProgressiveChristianity.org, gives his insight into the Emerging/Emergent Church movement from a progressive Christian perspective.

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Inclusive Hymns for Liberating Christians

Inclusive Hymns for Liberating Christians.

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