Word: methodist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Over the last few decades that has proven to be an ever-weakening predictor of moral and political behavior, particularly as denominational definitions have become more elastic and fewer people are attending a church because of the specifics of its doctrine. The current sociological truism is that a Methodist who finds his way to church three times a week and a Catholic who attends daily Mass have more in common than either does with a Christmas-and-Easter liberal in his own church...
...raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in Baptist and Methodist teachings as children, but religious faith never really took root in their hearts. My mother's own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters of the world's people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal...
...movie reports all this quite objectively, using only a liberal Methodist radio talk show host named Mike Papantonio, to answer the fundamentalists. But Papantonio's main point is that the tie-in between fundamentalism and political agendas violates America's fundamental church-state separation. This is self-evidently true and at a moment when a church in Pasadena is under investigation by the IRS because a liberal, election-eve sermon was preached from its pulpit, while no one looks into the doings at Devil's Lake or at the churches of the evangelical ministers who endorse them...
...think it's funny when she says that. There are 600 to 800 college campuses involved in The Vagina Monologues. It is in schools like Southern Methodist University, in community colleges in Tennessee and in African-American schools. It has also spread to 81 countries. It has been performed in villages in Africa and backwater towns in the Philippines. I once saw a production at Riker's Island! So, if she wants to call it elitist, okay...
...described as a party that doesn't appeal to religious voters, as African Americans attend church in high numbers and tend to vote Democratic, but Ted Strickland is an unusual candidate as well: the congressman has a master's degree in divinity, has worked as an administrator at a Methodist children's home and talks openly about his faith in campaign...