Progressive Spirituality - Page 8 of 9

Defending Ordination Rights in Michigan

May 21st, 2012

The U.S. state of Michigan may be the site of yet another challenge to ordination rights. Current state law lacks specific language on what standards wedding officiants must meet to perform a legal wedding ceremony, but this may change with the continued growt Continue Reading »

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Ministers Search for the Spiritual Brain

April 30th, 2012

Where in the brain does God reside? Does spiritual experience originate in the mind? Such questions are nearly unanswerable, but scientists are beginning to paint a clearer picture of what happens inside our brains during moments of spiritual insight. We are b Continue Reading »

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Bronze-Age Sexism in the Modern-Day Church

February 23rd, 2012

You're sitting in the pew at church, listening to the pastor give a sermon on the proper relationship between wives and husbands. He (although he could be a she) quotes Ephesians 5:22-3, and immediately your ears prick up. Your pulse quickens and your skin bec Continue Reading »

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Washington State Legalizes Gay Marriage

February 13th, 2012

On Monday, 13 February, Washington State legalized gay marriage when Governor Christine Gregoire signed into law a marriage equality bill passed by the state Legislature. On the same day, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum was visiting the state to meet Continue Reading »

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Why Florida's School Prayer Bill is a Bad Idea

February 3rd, 2012

On the same day as the Washington state senate votes on a bill to legalize gay marriage, the Florida senate was preparing to vote on a bill that would legalize prayer in public school classrooms, further illustrating the widening rift between the religious rig Continue Reading »

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“Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus” Video Sparks Furore

January 20th, 2012

Just two days after it was posted on Youtube, the video had racked up over 2 million views and now has over 15 million. The number of comments now totals over 30,000. In it, the author, Jefferson Brethke, recites a poem about the fundamental difference between Continue Reading »

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Why Should Church and State Be Kept Separate?

November 16th, 2011

By now many of us are familiar with the right-wing argument that religion and government are inextricably intertwined, that the two have always mixed and can never be completely separated, and that the Constitution does not bar religious influence in governanc Continue Reading »

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Protecting Bullies in the Name of Religion

November 16th, 2011

It's almost impossible to believe that a lawmaker would try to insert a religious exemption into a proposed anti-bullying law, but that's exactly what one Michigan senator tried to do. Now, however, it looks as though that exemption will be removed from the bi Continue Reading »

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Does Reading the Bible Make People More Liberal?

October 27th, 2011

Frequent Bible-reading can make people more liberal, posits a Baylor University doctoral candidate in his master's thesis, contradicting commonly-held stereotypes about liberals and conservatives. (That is something for ULC wedding officiants to ponder, given Continue Reading »

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Christian Professor: “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?”

October 15th, 2011

Did Jesus die for Worf too? One man has attempted to answer this very question. A while ago on the ULC Monastery blog, we discussed what discovering extraterrestrial life would mean for religion, but we did not exactly address how such a discovery might chall Continue Reading »

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