But the loss of their key center and probably the main leadership and overall strength of the movement opened the way for Pauline Christian influence which is clear particularly in Luke (both his Gospel and Acts).

“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.

When my family stopped going to church a few years ago, quite a few Christians told me (with some Bible quotes thrown in for good measure) that Christians were supposed to spend time together. My family was …

God and religion come in for bad press these days. Is religion worth keeping? Are militant atheists misguided? Do religion and spirituality need each other? Is it possible to build tolerance and respect in a divided world? And can science play a role? Eleanor Stoneham explains why the answer to all these questions is a resounding ‘yes’.

A socio-cultural model of Judean ethnicity is developed, being a synthesis of (1) Sanders’ notion of covenantal nomism, (2) Berger and Luckmann’s theories on the sociology of knowledge, (3) Dunn’s “four pillars of Second Temple Judaism” and his “new perspective” on Paul, (4) cultural or social anthropology in the form of modern ethnicity theory, and, lastly, (5) Duling’s Socio-Cultural Model of Ethnicity.

This volume invites readers to walk in Israelite sandals, that is, to take a journey of the imagination, and to immerse themselves in the identity, values, and institutions of first-century CE Israelites with the help of contemporary social-scientific studies and theories.

When one comes in a never-uttered name
God wins the glory for all that is done:
It’s in hoping for what cannot be claimed
That every inch of justice is won.

“Can Christianity Survive the Prejudice of Christians? A Revolution in Faith and Ethics” presented by John Shelby Spong from Vann Center for Ethics on Vimeo

The great dividing line for two religions and the relationship between them is the period of 66-70 CE, which ended in the destruction of both Jerusalem and the great “Second Temple”. For Jews of the time this destroyed the political, economic and religious organization of Israel….

At Religion Dispatches, Peter Laarman writes a heartfelt open letter, ordained pastor to ordained pastor, to Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the “Hispanic Karl Rove,” as Greg Metzger characterizes him.

In Bad Girls and Boys Go To Hell (or not), Gloria Neufeld Redekop takes us on her own personal journey as she engages a movement in which she was raised, conducting a careful study of the history of fundamentalist evangelicalism, the attachment to a literal-factual interpretation of the Bible, and an analysis of the experience of those who have left the movement.

Now there are at least two major types of people who do take seriously what is said in the New Testament (NT), which I’m summarizing here as “the Gospel.” Here are the two types, for our purposes in this very brief summary of NT understanding as it relates to who wrote the books…