A few weeks ago the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution regarding the religiously unaffiliated. In it, the committee contends that “the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic Party.” It was seen as an attempt to solidify a growing portion of Democratic voters.
But could that resolution turn off another important voting bloc, namely, white Protestant voters?
Pope Francis created 13 new cardinals at his sixth consistory on October 5. Ten are under 80 years old and therefore will be eligible to vote at the next conclave for his successor.
With the creation of these new Catholic princes, who share Francis’s emphasis on a missional and evangelizing church, Francis has now named a total of 91 new cardinals, and more than 52 percent of the voting cardinals, giving him the power to reshape the church.
Democratic presidential hopefuls waded into theological waters while speaking at a forum on LGBTQ equality on October 10 in Salt Lake City, contrasting their liberal approaches to faith with those of religious perspectives that oppose same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights.
Yes, a Christian student group can require its leaders to be Christian. That’s the decision a judge reached last week in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA v. the University of Iowa, a lawsuit the evangelical Christian campus ministry brought against the university and several of its leaders after the school booted InterVarsity and other religiously affiliated student groups for requiring their leaders to share their faiths. Those groups also included Muslims, Sikhs, and Latter-day Saints, according to a statement from InterVarsity.
Martin Luther’s defiant declaration to Catholic Church leaders in 1521, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” is treasured in Germany as a motto of virtuous subversion. Now church officials and other political groups are taking a stand against attempts by the far right National Democratic Party, or NPD, to co-opt Luther’s words as a campaign slogan.
Watching some 50,000 of her fellow Indian Americans line up outside a Houston stadium on September 22 to see India’s prime minister Narendra Modi take the stage at last month’s Howdy Modi rally, Sarah Philips felt sick.
Mixtures of religion and politics aren’t exactly unusual in Georgia, a state situated squarely in the heart of the Bible Belt, where asking someone where they go to church is a common icebreaker.
But this year, no one is combining faith—however broadly defined—and politics as acutely as Sarah Riggs Amico, 40, a newly announced Democratic candidate for US Senate, running to oppose incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue.
When Pope Francis visited the United Arab Emirates last February, he not only became the first pontiff to step foot on the Arabian Peninsula, but he also stood next to the leading religious figure in Sunni Islam and signed a landmark document pledging all believers to work together for the good of all and against religious extremism.
“Now the impossible has been accomplished!” Francis told Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, grand imam of al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, in an aside heard by a few close aides.
In late September, Wilberforce University received a gift of $1.2 million from an anonymous donor to launch a matching gift initiative for its #WilberforceUnite campaign. The African Methodist Episcopal–affiliated school—the oldest historically black college in the nation—has been trying to raise funds since being placed on probation by a regional accreditation agency earlier this year due to its ongoing financial struggles.
Ismail Alghazali has never met his five-month-old daughter.
“I live in darkness, and my family is my only light,” said Alghazali, a Yemeni American who works at a Brooklyn bodega and has not seen his wife and two young children in more than a year.
Alghazali is a US citizen and his wife has a heart condition that requires medical care, but the family has been separated as a result of the Trump administration’s travel ban. It only took a five-minute meeting with a consular officer for her visa from Yemen to be denied, he said.