Word: gospels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...should not perish but have everlasting life." Ah, here we go. Thirty-four people have annotated the famous verse and seven apparently feel my spiritual life will be enriched by their thoughts. Thus far, the eBible community has not attracted a theological elite. "A succinct presentation of the Gospel," writes Scott. "This is a great verse for football and baseball games," adds Chris. "Blah," notes Philip. Maybe Philip thought he was in "eDible." There are bare-bones user profiles of those who shared that seem less like a communictions aid than a marketing tool (name, length of time using site...
...work well together. But Bertone stands out because he is not a career diplomat, like Sodano and most secretaries of state in recent centuries. His theological and doctrinal background will serve Benedict's goals of turning the Curia into an administrative body aimed at facilitating the spreading of the gospel rather than consolidating its own power...
...addition to personal finances, a lot of evangelical churches have also avoided any pulpit talk about social inequality. When conservative Christianity split from the Mainline in the early 20th century, the latter pursued their commitment to the "social gospel" by working on poverty and other causes such as civil rights and the Vietnam-era peace movement. Evangelicals went the other way: they largely concentrated on issues of individual piety. "We took on personal salvation--we need our sins redeemed, and we need our Saviour," says Warren. But "some people tended to go too individualistic, and justice and righteousness issues were...
Confronting such stories, certain more doctrinally traditional Christians go ballistic. Last March, Ben Witherington, an influential evangelical theologian at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, thundered that "we need to renounce the false gospel of wealth and health--it is a disease of our American culture; it is not a solution or answer to life's problems." Respected blogger Michael Spencer--known as the Internet Monk--asked, "How many young people are going to be pointed to Osteen as a true shepherd of Jesus Christ? He's not. He's not one of us." Osteen is an irresistible target for experts from...
Most unnerving for Osteen's critics is the suspicion that they are fighting not just one idiosyncratic misreading of the gospel but something more daunting: the latest lurch in Protestantism's ongoing descent into full-blown American materialism. After the eclipse of Calvinist Puritanism, whose respect for money was counterbalanced by a horror of worldliness, much of Protestantism quietly adopted the idea that "you don't have to give up the American Dream. You just see it as a sign of God's blessing," says Edith Blumhofer, director of Wheaton College's Center for the Study of American Evangelicals. Indeed...