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Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

By Matt Hamilton

…chedule interviews. I don’t know how not to do this. Yet here I was at the Ananda Ashram in rural India, expecting (and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics and religion. The reporting would come later, however. First came three days in an ashram, and I hoped for a 72-hour hiatus from the compulsion t…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…!,” between a blurry “photo” and a pull quote informing readers that the “FAA launches top secret investigation into incident.” To those who dismiss any sort of faith in angels, they belong to a category that also includes ghosts and UFO abductions, clairvoyance and Sasquatch. There are reasons for such dismissals, of course. Many pop cultural representations of angels borrow extensively from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at re…

Catholic Bishops’ Theological Mistakes on Abortion Come at a High Price

By Mary E. Hunt

…eople gathered outside the hospital to express their views in favor of and against the procedure. An anti-abortion advocate, who had worked in President Bolsonaro’s Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights, revealed the child’s name in the press. Her young life, already turned upside down, was turned inside out. I observe this case from a distance. But it resonates with other such heinous examples of patriarchal thinking and doing that are commo…

We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

By Anthony Adams

…nalism is good, but individualism is bad. Also, he notes but offers no explanation for the decreasing number of marriages in many countries. I am glad to see that in Section 34 he understands this basic fact of contemporary western culture: The ideal of marriage, marked by a commitment to exclusivity and stability, is swept aside whenever it proves inconvenient or tiresome. The fear of loneliness and the desire for stability and fidelity exist sid…

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…e loophole Sullivan gives himself on the matter of sexual freedom is the characteristic heresy of progressive Christians: “It is to progressive Christianity as the heresy of the prosperity gospel, or nationalism, is to conservative American Christianity.” Just two points about this. First, it has not been my experience that progressive Christians are blind to the problems of a hypersexualized culture or that they/we are saying libertinism is accep…

Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

By Anthea Butler

…ired from Fuller and moved to Colorado Springs! I felt like I worked at a catalog call-in center. Seriously. I would never have expected to be talking about Wagner in conjunction with the 2012 election cycle, but here goes: C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran Professor of Church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary when I was there as a student in the early 1990s. He had had a career on the mission field in South America before coming to Full…

Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

By Charlotte Dalwood

…tside Episcopal churches—they experience them within Episcopal churches at alarmingly high rates, too. And the denomination’s structures (canon law included) have consistently failed to protect them. New data reveals the scope of the abuse crisis Buried deep in the Reports to the General Convention are the results of a survey, conducted in 2020, that quantifies the violence epidemic. Based on a similar survey conducted in 2017 amongst United Metho…

Power Up: Turn Off the Cell Phone

By Daniel Schultz

…ork for you. The article literally discusses someone getting Third-World peasants to loan her a cell in a pinch. You don’t get much more entitled than that. Still, there is something to be said for the virtues of unhooking from technology. I sometimes wonder if the convenience of having a cell is worthwhile, given that one of its most common uses is to find out where my wife got to in Kohl’s. But it seems to me that focusing on the micro-trend of…

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…ompaniment, chanted on iPod, and piped from watches into earplugs—they are available in as many digital forms as there are devices to access them. Hopeful worshippers are even constructing their own online religious “texts” in the form of digitized prayers, video accompaniment to existing religious texts, and the recording and sharing of recitation of prayers and liturgy. But as religious texts go digital, they acquire new qualities. What are the…

“Saints Are Only Human”: Leaving the Church, But Heeding this Pope’s Lessons

By Elizabeth Colmant Estes

…seething about the pope’s visit with Kim Davis. A gay man who refuses to vacate his Roman Catholic pew, Robby’s Facebook post on the topic read: “The Pope went to see Kim Davis to ask for forgiveness for his part in the history of bigotry that formed her messed up beliefs that got her ass thrown in jail.” I get where he is coming from. But to me, the most important thing about the papal visit was not the agenda he upheld, but the stance he held u…