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September 16th, 2014
03:50 PM ET
Adrian Peterson and the false gospel of spankingOpinion by Matthew Paul Turner, special to CNN [twitter-follow screen_name='JesusNeedsNewPR'] (CNN) – There’s one detail about the Adrian Peterson child abuse charges that no one seems to be noting: his alleged crimes didn’t happen simply under the guise of “parenting” but rather “Christian parenting.” But the NFL star's Christianity shouldn’t be missed or undervalued in the sharp debate about his actions. Those of us who grew up in conservative Christian churches know all too well the culture that shapes the parenting beliefs of people like Peterson. Today, the most notable proponents of spanking are American evangelicals. They not only preach the gospel of corporal punishment, they also impart messages that lay the foundations for abuses against children and the protection of such abuse by our legal system. We have books about spanking. Popular Christian talk shows promote the benefits of spanking. Pastors preach and theologize spanking. Organizations like Focus on the Family offer parents resources about how and when to spank. The ties between Christianity and corporal punishment are so strong that a large number of conservative Christians parents simple deny studies that suggest spanking does more harm than good. Now, I’m not saying that evangelical churches are to blame for what Peterson did to his son. But the church isn’t innocent in the matter, either. Without the church, the popularity of spanking would have dwindled. Stricter laws would probably be in place to protect the rights and livelihoods of children. And people like Peterson would not feel as though he has a license to do whatever he wants to his child. For decades, American evangelicals have fiercely fought any legal or cultural limits on parents’ “rights” to discipline their children. As a result, American children are some of the least protected people in the world. They are often innocent pawns to the vile disciplinarian doctrine of folks like Michael and Debi Pearl, pro-spanking theologians who suggest that corporal punishment should begin when a child is only 6 months old. But spanking theologies are not simply the teachings of Christian extremists.
September 10th, 2014
11:45 AM ET
How Christians should respond to domestic violenceOpinion by Russell D. Moore, special to CNN
The horror in the country crossed all the usual ideological and political divisions. Consciences intuitively knew this was wrong and shocking. The video brought to light for many Americans what every church and religious institution in America must deal with on an ongoing basis: violence against women. As a Christian, I believe it’s important to see this issue through the dual lenses of both the responsibility of the state and of the church. The state, and the larger culture, has a responsibility to work against such violence. The Scripture says that the state is delegated a “sword” of justice to be used against “evildoers” (Roman 13:4). That clearly applies in these horrifying cases. Often, men who abuse their wives or girlfriends will seek to hide under the cover of therapeutic language, as they seek to “deal” with their “issues.” There is no question that a man who would abuse a woman is socially and psychologically twisted, but we should not allow this to in any way ameliorate the moral and public evil involved in these cases.
August 18th, 2014
01:35 PM ET
The Pope says ISIS must be stopped. But how?By Daniel Burke, CNN Belief Blog Editor [twitter-follow screen_name='BurkeCNN'] (CNN) - Nearly everyone agrees that the militant Muslim group rampaging through northern Iraq must be stopped. The question is, how? Asked if he approved of the American airstrikes against ISIS, Pope Francis withheld his moral imprimatur on Monday, refusing to fully support or denounce the military campaign. "I can only say this: It is licit to stop the unjust aggressor," the pontiff said during a press conference on the plane back to Rome from South Korea. "I underline the verb: stop. I do not say bomb, make war, I say stop by some means." In an apparent reference to the United States, Francis said "one nation alone cannot judge" the best means of stopping groups like ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State. Those decisions should be made collectively by the United Nations, the pontiff said. "It is there that this should be discussed. Is there an unjust aggressor? It would seem there is. How do we stop him?" the Pope asked, without answering his own question. Already, Francis' cautious comments about American airstrikes and the use of force have fostered a welter of interpretations, from "tacit approval" to a "yellow light" to outright endorsement. The Pope who was returning to Rome after a five day trip to South Korea, may soon have the chance to clarify his moral argument personally to U.S. and UN officials.
August 9th, 2014
06:01 PM ET
Why missionaries put their lives on the lineBy Daniel Burke and Ashley Fantz, CNN (CNN) - It wasn’t as if God's voice boomed through sun-parted clouds, telling Kent Brantly to move his family to Liberia. Still, the young doctor said, the call was clear. It echoed through the congregation where he was raised, Southeastern Church of Christ in Indianapolis. Standing before the church community in July 2013, months before he left for Africa, Brantly said he heard the call in the teachers who urged him to memorize Scripture and the neighbors who funded his first mission trip years ago. He saw it in the aunts and uncles who spent their vacations running Bible camps, organizing youth groups and serving missions themselves in Africa. “It may not seem like much,” Brantly said in an emotional address to the Southeastern congregation, “but when you connect the dots you see a grand design that God has used to draw my life in a certain direction.” For Brantly, that meant serving a two-year medical mission in Liberia with Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief organization. But in a grim twist that garnered international headlines, the 33-year-old contracted Ebola while treating patients and was airlifted back to the United States. Brantly and a fellow missionary, Nancy Writebol, who was serving with SIM, another Christian aid organization, are being treated for the disease at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. After Liberia's outbreak began in March 2013, Writebol volunteered at a hospital in Monrovia, where she disinfected doctors and nurses working with patients stricken by the disease. Despite their weakened health, their trust in God remains strong, family members said. “Mom is tired from her travel, but continues to fight the virus and strengthen her faith in her Redeemer, Jesus,” said Jeremy Writebol, Nancy’s son. On Friday, Brantly said that he felt a spiritual serenity even after learning his diagnosis. “I remember a deep sense of peace that was beyond all understanding,” he said. “God was reminding me of what he had taught me years ago, that he will give me everything I need to be faithful to him. Though Brantly's wife and children had been in Liberia with him, they had returned to the United States when he became ill.  This tweet from Breanna Mitchell sparked a fierce debate over selfies and sacred spaces.
July 22nd, 2014
08:53 AM ET
Smiling for 'Auschwitz selfies,' and crying into the digital wildernessOpinion by Craig Detweiler, Special to CNN
A tour of a concentration camp, where so many Jews lost their lives, may move us to take photos or post responses - but few would include smiles, or selfies. But Mitchell is not the first teenager to generate Internet outrage by her response to the Holocaust. When Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House last year, he wrote in the museum guest book, “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully, she would have been a Belieber.” While many have ripped into Mitchell and Bieber for their insensitivity, I don’t think they intended to be disrespectful to the dead. Thanks to the ubiquity of mobile devices (mobiquity!), adolescent mistakes and hard lessons that used to be learned in private can quickly devolve into public drubbings. This is what happens when new technologies clash with ancient understandings of the sacred. The problem is so pervasive that a Tumblr site, “Selfies at Serious Places” is dedicated to such faux pas. We have very few spaces that our culture considers sacred, where an association with the divine results in a feeling of awe or reverence. Death may seem especially abstract to young people who haven’t been shown how to grieve, mourn or respect the dead. So how might we help the emerging generation to develop a digital decorum that accounts for sacred spaces? Can we incorporate electronic ethics into religious instruction?
July 8th, 2014
01:01 PM ET
Eye for an eye: The Bible's role in revenge attacksOpinion by Joel Baden, special to CNN (CNN) - This past Sunday, six Israelis were arrested for the murder of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy. Israeli officials admitted the likelihood—already acknowledged by many—that this killing was carried out in revenge for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers. Both sides have stepped up their aggression in the past few days, with rocket launches from Gaza into Israel and Israeli airstrikes against Gaza. It’s a familiar cycle: attack for attack, murder for murder. Such patterns are familiar from conflicts across the world, but they have a special resonance in the Holy Land. After all, it was from Israel, nearly 3,000 years ago, that this famous concept spread. The Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible says, “The penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.” 
June 26th, 2014
12:14 PM ET
Vatican softens tone toward gays and lesbiansBy Delia Gallagher, CNN ROME (CNN) - The Vatican said Thursday that gays and lesbians must be treated with respect, their children may be baptized in the church, and admitted that Catholic priests are sometimes unsure about how to deal with same-sex couples. There is a “certain unease at the challenge of accepting these people with a merciful spirit and, at the same time, holding to the moral teaching of the Church,” the Vatican said in a document, called an Instrumentum Laboris. The 75-page document is a compilation of the results of a survey sent to 114 bishops’ conferences around the world. Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, General Secretary of the Synod, said that 85% of the conferences responded to the survey. The document will be used as a guideline for discussions at a synod, a meeting of top Catholic bishops convened by Pope Francis, to be held in Rome in October. The official name of the synod is "The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization."
June 12th, 2014
08:42 PM ET
How Judaism predicted the first humanoid robotOpinion by Mark Goldfeder, special to CNN (CNN) - To the team of researchers, Eugene Goostman seemed like a nice Jewish boy from Odessa, Ukraine. In fact, he was a computer. In convincing some of the researchers that Goostman was real, the computer program became the first to pass the Turing Test for artificial intelligence. The Turing Test, named for British mathematician Alan Turing, is often thought of as the benchmark test for true machine intelligence. Since 1950, thousands of scientific teams have tried to create something capable of passing, but none has succeeded. That is, until Saturday – and, appropriately for the Goostman advance, our brave new world can learn a bit from Jewish history.
May 1st, 2014
09:15 AM ET
Why Christians should support the death penaltyOpinion by R. Albert Mohler Jr., Special to CNN (CNN) - The death penalty has been part of human society for millennia, understood to be the ultimate punishment for the most serious crimes. But, should Christians support the death penalty now, especially in light of the controversial execution Tuesday in Oklahoma? This is not an easy yes or no question. On the one hand, the Bible clearly calls for capital punishment in the case of intentional murder. In Genesis 9:6, God told Noah that the penalty for intentional murder should be death: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” The death penalty was explicitly grounded in the fact that God made every individual human being in his own image, and thus an act of intentional murder is an assault upon human dignity and the very image of God. In the simplest form, the Bible condemns murder and calls for the death of the murderer. The one who intentionally takes life by murder forfeits the right to his own life.
April 23rd, 2014
03:46 PM ET
Pope stirs Communion debate with call to womanBy Daniel Burke, CNN Belief Blog Co-editor (CNN) - Pope Francis called an Argentine woman married to a divorced man and reportedly told her that she could receive the sacrament of Communion, according to the woman's husband, in an apparent contradiction of Catholic law. Julio Sabetta, from San Lorenzo in the Pope's home country, said his wife, Jacqueline Sabetta Lisbona, spoke with Francis on Monday. Jacqueline Sabetta Lisbona wrote to the pontiff in September to ask for clarification on the Communion issue, according to her husband, who said his divorced status had prevented her from receiving the sacrament. "She spoke with the Pope, and he said she was absolved of all sins and she could go and get the Holy Communion because she was not doing anything wrong," Sabetta told Channel 3 Rosario, a CNN affiliate. A Vatican spokesman confirmed the telephone call but would not comment on the conversation's content. "It's between the Pope and the woman," said the Rev. Thomas Rosica, a consultant for the Vatican press office. |
  About this blog
The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. It's edited by CNN's Daniel Burke with contributions from Eric Marrapodi and CNN's worldwide news gathering team.  |
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(CNN) - The country collectively winced as we watched an NFL running back punch his fiancee in the face on an elevator, captured by security video.
(CNN) - It is understandable why Breanna Mitchell’s sunny tweet from Auschwitz as “PrincessBMM” would spark a viral outcry.
