Faith life
Where Do Evangelicals Stand on CEO Compensation?
In the spirit of this week’s question on how different religious groups relate to the massive financial troubles on Wall Street, I spent time this morning digging through resources on how evangelicals view the issue of CEO compensation. With the federal bailout package currently stalled in Congress ландшафтin part because of a debate over whether [...]
24Sep2008 | Andrea Useem | 5 comments | ContinuedOn the Spiritual Perils of Religion Writing: Q&A with Rod Dreher
As a journalist, writing in the first person is still pretty new for me. But starting this site, blogging professionally and generally entering the Web 2.0 world is essential for my professional survival, and reading Romenesko, the blog-stlye round-up of media-industry news, reminds me of that fact daily. On the one hand, it’s freeing to [...]
15Sep2008 | Andrea Useem | 12 comments | Continued“Surprised by God:” On Falling in Love with Religious Law
Danya Ruttenberg’s memoir, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, about how she grew from an athiest-Jewish high schooler to an observant-Jewish 30-something rabbi is really fantastic: well-written, engaging, skating that line between the personal and the universal with surprising grace. While reading it, I had to restrain myself from [...]
10Sep2008 | Andrea Useem | 1 comment | Continued
Obama in Lynchburg: The Faith-versus-Works Debate
Here’s a photo I took this weekend while driving through Lynchburg, the central Virginia town where religious right leader Jerry Falwell ministered and built Liberty University. The sign outside this small church reads, as you can see: “USA TELL OBAMA JESUS CHRIST NEEDED FOR SALVATION READ ACTS 4:12.”
Part of the reason this sign caught my [...]
What the Heck Is the Emerging Church? A “Velvet Elvis” Answer
I always like new ideas, and I relish nothing more than watching big, paradigm-shifting movements overturn the status quo. (This probably has something to do with my birth-order position as a “rebellious” second child, but anyways.) Emergent Christianity has tickled my interest recently because it is just that: a completely new way of doing things. [...]
16Jul2008 | Andrea Useem | 4 comments | Continued
When God Goes Bad: Shalom Auslander’s Memoir of Rotten Religion
Here’s something I don’t like doing: Writing frankly about my own life. Here’s something I love doing: Reading other people write frankly about their lives. As a result, I love Shalom Auslander’s book, Foreskin’s Lament, in which he writes with a hilarious, tragic clarity about his life as a recovering Orthodox Jew.
Luckily, Auslander is funny [...]
God and Forgiveness on the Bathroom Floor: Immaculee Ilibagiza and the Rwandan Genocide
Some books are so powerful, so disturbing, I almost hesitates to recommend them or pass along a copy to a friend. Left to Tell, a spiritual autobiography written by a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, is one such book. A friend who read it at her church lent it to me, and the book spent [...]
17Jun2008 | Andrea Useem | 5 comments | ContinuedEmergent Islam? Surfing toward an Ultra-modern American Faith Life
Sometimes while doing research for a writing project, I will end up spending several hours or an entire afternoon or evening clicking from one website to the next, engrossed in the world of online content. My writing project these days is about how religious congregations use Web 2.0 technologies — research that will culminate this [...]
22May2008 | Andrea Useem | 10 comments | ContinuedDoes Polygamy Have a Legal Future in the U.S.?
Having written previously about polyamory (maintaining multiple romantic relationships) and polygamy (well, really, polygyny — having more than one wife at at time,) I have been intensely interested in the on-going case in Texas, in which more than 400 children of polygamists were put into temporary state custody following allegations of physical and sexual abuse [...]
11May2008 | Andrea Useem | 6 comments | ContinuedMormon American Idol, Church on Second Life and Barack Obama in Indiana
It’s been a big night, yet another Tuesday evening of clicking back and forth between American Idol and Democratic primary results. So first things first: It looks like America is going to have its first-ever Mormon American Idol in 17-year-old David Archuleta. The three judges, Randy, Paula and Simon, go crazy for Archuleta’s earnest crooning, [...]
6May2008 | Andrea Useem | 7 comments | Continued