Confronting Religious Denial of Gay Marriage PDF Download

Author: Catherine M. Wallace
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498225411
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Writing in part for secular humanists, non-Christians, and ex-Christians, Wallace locates the beginning of religious vilification of LBGTQ Americans: these attacks recycle earlier, equally reactionary political opposition to racial desegregation and equal rights for women. Then, step by step, she lays out three major flaws in the religious argument against gay marriage. First, it derives from Plato and Greco-Roman sexual anxieties, not from Jesus. Second, opposition to gay marriage takes Bible verses out of context, ignoring their roots in Iron Age biology, sexual politics in the classic era, and pagan ritual practices. Third and most importantly, this opposition reflects an inadequate moral theology based on a denial of contemporary science and social science. Then and only then does she offer her own concept of marriage as a morally rooted, creative process, laying out common ground easily shared by Christian humanists and secular humanists alike. Her nimble, accessible account, richly leavened by personal stories, will facilitate new conversations and alliances among all those, believers and nonbelievers alike, who affirm the moral dignity of gay marriage.

Author: Catherine M. Wallace
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498228747
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Confronting Religious Denial of Science: Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination traces the cultural backstory of contemporary conflicts between biblical literalists who oppose evolution and "New Atheists" who insist that religion is so pernicious it should be outlawed, if not exterminated. That's a clash of fundamentalisms. It's a zero-sum game derived from high Victorian misunderstanding of both religion and science. The God whom science supposedly replaces is the Engineer Almighty sitting at his keyboard, controlling every event on earth. But that's not a viable concept of God. Far better, Wallace argues, to understand Christianity in Clifford Geertz's terms as a system of symbols that both constitutes a worldview and, according to David Sloan Wilson, encourages prosocial behavior. That reframing makes it possible to reclaim what biblical scholars have said for decades: the miracles of Jesus were confrontational symbolic actions. They contradicted the political status quo in colonial Palestine, not the laws of biology. Prayer, she explains, is not magical thinking. It's a creative, highly disciplined introspective process, most familiar to many people in forms like mindfulness meditation. Wallace offers an intriguing exploration of issues that believers seldom discuss in ways that make sense to the religiously unaffiliated. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

Author: Catherine M. Wallace
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498228844
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy provide the conceptual foundations of theocracy, which is to say religiously-based totalitarianism. These absolutist doctrines emerge for the very first time among the Victorians: they are not ancient beliefs at all. They appear in the 19th century, right alongside secular varieties totalitarian thought, and in response to all the same cultural anxieties. Reactionary religious leaders used these doctrines to oppose scholarly conclusions in geology and evolutionary biology. That much everyone knows. What's not as well known is the fact that their principal target was Christian-humanist biblical scholarship, an unbroken 500-year tradition of inquiry undertaken primarily by Christian clergy and seminary faculty. The alternative to faith-based totalitarianism is faith based upon the imagination, our most sophisticated cognitive skill. Faith rooted in the moral imagination does not depend upon abject deference to an array of rigid doctrines and improbable claims. Wallace contends that faith is best understood as a creative process, and religion is best understood as a multi-media art (and originally the Mother of all arts). The arts convince, they do not command. They persuade, they do not prove. The arts provide humane resources whereby we grapple with life's deepest mysteries. Symbolism, like quantum mathematics, is a tool for grappling with inescapable paradox at the heart of reality. It is an ancient strategy for articulating what we discover at the elusive mind-body interface. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

Author: Catherine M. Wallace
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498228879
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Come to church or go to hell. That's religious bullying. It's judgmentalism. And it's a theological distortion, a distortion insisting that shame and self-loathing are morally appropriate. In Christian humanist tradition, God is not some cosmic judge eager to smite all of us for our sinfulness. God is compassion. We are cherished by God beyond our wildest imagining. We are called to radical hospitality, not to crass judgmentalism. So where does this religious judgmentalism come from? It is the heritage of medieval theocracy: a violent, vindictive God of command and control was far more useful politically than a God of compassion, hospitality, and forgiveness. It comes from literal-minded misreading of the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit, a story about shame, not disobedience. And it comes from political success in exploiting deep-seated liabilities in the American soul: we spend our lives trying to "prove ourselves," a hopeless task. There's an alternative. In the Christian humanist tradition, authentic moral judgment is rooted in conscience as a creative process. Morality is an art demanding both rigorous consideration of the facts and thoughtful introspection. Conscience properly understood and thoughtfully practiced is an antidote to shame, incessant self-criticism, and chronic self-doubt. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

Author: Catherine M. Wallace
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498228828
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Confronting Religious Violence: Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination tells the tale of Christian theocracy in the West. Who converted whom was never entirely clear: the empire did stop feeding people to the lions for public entertainment; but Christianity was theologically corrupted by its official role in legitimating empire-as-usual. That theological corruption led to crusades, inquisitions, torture, and so forth. And it leaves us with a major question: is God violent? More dangerously yet: is violence our only option in response to wrongdoing? Are we morally obligated to injure those who have injured others, to kill those who have killed others? If theocracy is a terrible idea, what is the proper relationship between church and state? We can't say that the state is never morally accountable at all. Furthermore: despite constitutional separation of church and state, hard-right Christian fundamentalism continues to play a culturally significant role in advocating military action abroad and supporting state violence at home. There is a lot at stake in reclaiming the systematic nonviolence and moral imagination of Jesus of Nazareth.

Author: Mel White
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781936833092
Category : Evangelicalism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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"Holy Terror" documents the 30-year war that fundamentalist Christians have waged against gays and lesbians and offers dramatic, heartbreaking evidence that fundamentalist leaders are waging nothing less than a "holy war" against sexual minorities.

Author: Catherine M. Wallace
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498228941
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Christianity has lost control of its brand. That matters even for nonbelievers because Christian symbolism permeates Western culture. It shapes the source code for how we think about ourselves and what we expect from one another. If God is all-controlling, then human control is divinely sanctioned. Our efforts to control one another have cosmic legitimacy--the legitimacy claimed by fundamentalists pursuing a political agenda that has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth. But if God is defined as compassion and loving-kindness, then Christianity calls the faithful to compassion and radical hospitality. Wallace traces the backstory of this vitally important tension all the way back to competing translations of Moses's argument with the burning bush, arguing for a "Copernican turn" in which the spiritual encounter with compassionate Presence lies at the heart of Christianity.

Author: Matthew Vines
Publisher: Convergent
ISBN: 1601425163
Category : Christian gays
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Reinterpretations of key Bible texts related to sexual orientation, written by a Harvard student, present an accessible case for a modern Christian conservative acceptance of sexual diversity.

Author: Catherine M. Wallace
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498228917
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Jesus did not die to save us from God. He died because the Romans did not tolerate charismatic teachers who attracted a lively following. Jesus attracted that following through his personal compassion, his confrontational inclusivity, and his skill in using laughter as a nonviolent weapon of mass disruption. The Gospel authors picked up Jesus' witty techniques. They adeptly parodied the literary conventions of heroic biography, laying out "the kingdom of God" in a point-for-point contrast with the empire of Caesar Augustus. Most of this contrast was Jewish Prophetic Rant, Standard Edition: the God of the Jews had always demanded justice for workers, food for the hungry, care for those unable to earn a living, and an end to monopolizing natural resources for private and imperial profit. Jesus added a fourth and telling point: God is nonviolent. God smites no one. God's loving-kindness and compassionate presence embraces all of humanity equally. We are all the children of God. Then and now, that's a revolutionary claim. It portrays our obligation to the common good as a sacred obligation. It's owed to God. In cultural terms, that's the most potent variety of obligation. This is the cultural heritage at risk from fundamentalism, which portrays God as both crazy-violent and vindictive.

Author: Erwin W. Lutzer
Publisher: Moody Publishers
ISBN: 1575675218
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
HEADLINE: Is it really that big of a deal? A May 2009 Gallup poll revealed that fifty-seven percent of Americans oppose same-sex marriage, while only forty percent are in favor of it (down from forty-six percent in 2007). This short, easy-to-read book helps shed light on what so many people believe, and why they ought not be at a loss about what to do now. The headlines only tell part of the story. In this revised and updated version of his bestselling book, Dr. Erwin Lutzer clearly and accurately depicts the truth about what is at stake here. By asking the right questions and by pinpointing the very real ramifications of same-sex marriage this handbook will help guide reality back to Truth. Dr. Lutzer expertly answers the questions that so many individuals, parents, friends, and families are asking: -How did we get to this point? -Why is marriage, as God intended it, better—and healthier? -How can I talk to my kids about this? -How do I responsibly read, watch, and filter the news? -Is there still hope? Let no one say that we have to choose between loving homosexuals and opposing same-sex marriages. Biblically, love is defined not as license to legitimatize sinful behavior of any kind, but love helps us see that there is a better way. Obviously, we must be as concerned about our own sins as we are about the sins of the homosexual community. We must be concerned enough to speak out about any action, heterosexual or homosexual, that violates God’s intended plan for marriage and the family. This simple, straightforward look at the issue of same-sex marriage will equip you to know what is really happening and, most importantly, why it matters for you.