Entries associated with the tag "Christianity Today":

Football fandom is kind of a substitute for community, writes historian Eric Miller in this month's cover story  in Christianity Today. I read through it hoping to find something a bit more original. There wasn't, unless you count this paragraph:

"So we must ask of the NFL what we must ask of any entity with the ability to touch our souls and shape our lives: Does it have our best -- and our children's best -- interests at heart? Is there good evidence that it even knows our best interests? More particularly, to what lengths will it go to create a wholly faithful, devoted congregation, er … 'fan base'?"

Good questions. Subversive ones, too. What if Miller's readers took them seriously enough to ask them of their own church and religion? Christopher Hitchens did effectively that in God Is Not Great (page 212) and the result wasn't anything CT would ever publish:

Pascal's famous wager, Hitchens writes, "reminds me of the hypocrites and frauds who abound in Talmudic Jewish rationalization. Don't do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it. You obeyed the letter of the law: who's counting? The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her. Shia Muslims offer 'temporary marriage,' selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable. . .

"This pathetic moral spectacle would not be necessary if the original rules were ones that it would be possible to obey. But to the totalitarian edicts that begin with revelation from absolute authority, and that are enforced by fear, and based on a sin that had been committed long ago, are added regulations that are often immoral and impossible at the same time" -- such as the commandment forbidding people from thinking about coveting, or Jesus's saying that for a man looking at a woman the wrong way is the same thing as his committing adultery with her. "The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey."

It's enough to make the NFL look harmless.

Fun: Feministing finds the most baffling abstinence poster yet.

Not so much fun:  The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals tries to put the opposition to gay marriage on a scholarly, non-bigoted, non-religious basis. Co-editors Robert George of Princeton and Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago present eleven papers delivered at a Princeton conference in December 2004.

Admiring reviewer Glenn Stanton writes in Christianity Today:

"We are moving from this natural, universal model to a greater embrace of what I call 'disembodied procreation' in same-sex unions, where sperm and egg meet only in a Petri dish and foreplay is a legal contract.  [In one article] Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, considers family changes during the past 40 years. The pill and legalized abortion, says Wilcox, have dramatically separated sex, procreation, and the larger family unit. Each now stands on its own. Undermining the need for marriage and family, these medical 'advances' have disproportionately hurt the poor."

The people making these arguments--whether they use sectarian language or not--are, technically, not bigots.  They're not just out to stigmatize gay people. They want to see a world without contraception, so that the version of marriage they grew up with can be forever frozen in amber.