Diana Butler Bass talks about the changes reshaping the religious future

May 2, 2013

The future of faith
Diana Butler Bass, in a Huffington Post blog, writes about the “two significant cultural forces reshaping the religious future.” One such cultural force comprises the increasing number of those who identify themselves as the religiously unaffiliated (sometimes called the “nones”). The other cultural force is “the rise of religious pluralism and immigrant faith in everyday life throughout the West.” Because of these two forces she says the church needs to be thinking in new ways. “It is time for people of faith to be our very best, most creative, most open-minded, most neighborly selves, not otherwise,” says Bass.

Letha Dawson Scanzoni is an independent scholar, writer, and editor, and is the author or coauthor of nine books. In 1978, she and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott wrote Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, one of the earliest books urging evangelical Christians to rethink their views on homosexuality (updated edition, 1994, HarperOne). More recently, Letha coauthored (with social psychologist David G. Myers) What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (HarperOne, 2005 and 2006). Another of Letha’s most well-known books is All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today, coauthored with Nancy A. Hardesty (Word Books, 1974; revised edition, Abingdon, 1986; updated and expanded edition, Eerdmans, 1992). Letha served as editor of Christian Feminism Today in both its former print edition (EEWC Update) and its website for 19 years until her retirement in December 2013.

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