In his quest to prune the overgrowth of Christianity to reveal to root of the faith, Martin Luther famously reduced the number of sacraments from seven to three, discarding Holy Orders, Last Rites (now known as the Anointing of the Sick), Matrimony (still a sacred vow between two people) and Confirmation, and leaving three: Baptism, Holy Communion,…

The following is cross-posted at On Faith. I approached Rick Warren’s Saddleback Civil Forum with much anticipation, but without a clear idea of how he would handle the sensitive issues at the intersection of religion and politics.  I believe Pastor Warren set an example of civility that I hope others will follow, but at the…

  The language spoken at the Civil Forum at Saddleback was not the loaded tongue of Evangelical churches across America sometimes referred to as “Christianese.” Aside from one inquiry about the candidate’s personal faith in Jesus Christ, the values based political questions could have been delivered by Gwen Ifill as easily as Pastor Rick Warren.  The…

A new poll by the Barna group finds that Obama is leading in 18 of 19 different religious faith communities defined by the survey’s strict standards. McCain leads in only one–evangelicals. This is good news for Senator Obama and should translate into serious voting power in November.  It also provides a caution to him as…

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