If Brazilian Evangelicals follow the same cherry-picking “Jesus was woke” bullshit that USAian ones do, that could certainly cause issues.
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They haven’t reached that point yet. They are still at the level of the prosperity gospel, in which Christ is a kind of amulet to attract wealth. But little by little they are electing congressmen who, for the most part, support moral panic agendas while voting for neoliberal policies.
I believe that if there is more American influence in these religions, things could change.
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Pastor explains how ‘powerful’ Pope Leo ‘directly threatens’ fearful MAGA Christians
https://www.alternet.org/maga-fears-pope-leo/
“Leo has become a MAGA flashpoint not due to any dramatic break from Catholic doctrine, but because his worldview directly threatens the Christian nationalist engine behind the rising authoritarianism of our time,” Butler wrote. “He threatens to become a transnational counterweight to a rapidly expanding authoritarian religious network.”
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Let’s hope so… and if he could get his head right on Trans and gay rights, as well as giving women more power within the church, too…
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Via The Slacktivist:
His 1978 “The Prophetic Imagination” sold more than a million copies and remains a classic that is still frequently assigned in mainline seminaries. In the book, he showed how the biblical prophets, called to imagine a different world, disrupted politics and the dominant culture and its assumptions.
Brueggemann himself was critical of American consumerism, militarism and nationalism.
…and via that link:
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White evangelicals on reading that headline…
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I’m not sure how much this rewrites history, as the title asserts*, but still fascinating in any case.
Church Unearthed in Ethiopia Rewrites the History of Christianity in Africa
Archaeologists now can more closely date when the religion spread to the Aksumite Empire
(ETA; save button got away from me, again)
*e.g., I don’t know that this contradicts the tradition of Frumentius converting Ezana, even if it is apocryphal. Maybe they built it before that happened? There were Christians in the Roman Empire before Constantine converted, too (though more clandestine than putting up a church building).
There was an exhibit at the Met last year, about the links between Ethiopia, Egypt, Nubia & the Byzantine Empire so the find definitely fits with that. We didn’t make it to the Met exhibit before it closed, but we got the big book they put out.
They had a similar exhibit at the Walters Museum in Baltimore, that we did visit (& got that book, too).
Also: since this is 70 miles from the Red Sea*, and Eritrea lies in between, I’m wondering what they could find in Eritrea, if anyone’s able to do this type of work there.
*Assuming it (this specific instance) spread from the Red Sea - I’m thinking it could have come along the Nile & then overland (edit: I’m certain the Red Sea was a route, but not the only one). That book from the Met shows an artifact from Nubia, but the inscription looks like Ge’ez, suggesting an overland exchange (ETA: from both directions, for that particular artifact).
Which also reminds me, the pendant shown in the article did not look like Ge’ez (to me nor the person here who could legit discern it), & we wondered if it was some older pre- or proto-Ge’ez. I’m thinking there are some pertinent details that didn’t make it into the Smithsonian article. Still dug seeing it, tho.
P.S. While I am on the subject, I keep seeing YouTube videos, ostensibly narrated by Denzil Washington, about the Ethiopian Bible. I’m convinced that it’s AI-generated deceit (& so I won’t link to it, but a search for it turns up numerous versions across numerous channels) but I couldn’t prove why. I’d imagine that if Denzil Washington took a position on this, it might’ve turned up in some news article, somewhere, but I’m not finding any. If I’m right about the AI slop then this pisses me off (& I wonder if D.W. knows about it). That and a nickel…
(& more ETAs…)
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It’s an uphill struggle getting people to accept that Christians can be bad people.
But the even harder truth that people urgently need to grasp in this time of Christofascism is that for some understandings of Christianity, to be a GOOD Christian is to be a BAD person.
Denial makes things worse
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Most of us are not familiar, however, with the way in which the prophecies around Trump have taken a much darker turn. As I wrote in April, Jonathan Cahn, one of the most popular independent charismatic prophets in America, has been sharing his Jehu prophecy.
Jehu is an obscure and vicious ancient king of Israel whose chief claim to fame was overthrowing the house of Ahab, ordering the execution of the king’s wife, Queen Jezebel, killing King Ahab’s sons and piling their heads outside the city gates.
Cahn says that God “called Jehu to make his nation great again. Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp.” The vengeance of Jehu becomes the vengeance of Trump.
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More and more it seems that modern Christians are not Christians; they follow the Old Testament rather than the new. They seem to be Jewish, without being actually Jewish. (have I set the cat among the pigeons?)
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The way I put it is: if your fundamental tenet is “What would Jesus do? I’m going to do the opposite” then you’re an anti-Christ Christian. It does seem to describe these people perfectly.
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Might as well post French’s earlier column, wherein he compares Trump to a prosperity gospel preacher
And so, when Trump’s most radical Christian followers see Trump’s ostentatious wealth, watch him seethe and rage at his enemies, observe him seeking unchecked power and peddle trinkets for personal gain, it’s all of a piece. They don’t see a despot or a tyrant or a grifter. They see a president taking the form of a pastor they love.
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OK, so in the process of reading about this…
…I came across this, though with a different headline than what appears in the onebox:
The Muslim group that worships through work and community
…and from there one could do a very deep dive learning about Islam in Senegal.
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