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Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…ly one-quarter of Catholics attend mass every week (CARA has some of the best, most rigorous tracking of mass attendance; other surveys find higher percentages using more generous methodologies.) The number of priests and nuns has declined precipitously; from 58,000 to 38,000 for priests and from 125,000 to 50,000 for nuns. Despite a significantly larger population, there are 1,300 fewer parishes, with an average of just one priest per parish; som…

Rand Paul, Religious Skeptic?

By Sarah Posner

…amb, to sell not only his faith in God, but his faith in small government. Paul’s most sincerely held religious belief, no surprise, was in minimizing government. People “think somehow there’s salvation in government,” Paul said, but “there isn’t.” In fact, lack of government oversight has been a salvation, at least a financial one, for the Lambs. As NPR reported last year in an in-depth investigation of Daystar, the Internal Revenue Service permi…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…e ugliness and barbarity of indiscriminate violence. Too many people—not just dentists on Virgin Airlines—make statements like, “Muslims don’t do enough to reject terrorism.” It’s probable many of them have never met Muslims. If they tried, they might be surprised. In fact, the reaction to my essay—you’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good w…

Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

By Sarah Posner

…hen enacting the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). What was most striking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fired the most challenging questions at the companies’ lawyer, Paul Clement, confronting the essential underpinnings of his clients’ claims. In particular, they questioned whether RFRA was intended to cover corporations, whether a party can claim a religious exempt…

The Agenda in Making John Paul an Insta-Saint

By Patricia Miller

…onized Sunday, died in 2005, making his nine-year march to sainthood the fastest in the church’s history. His successor Pope Benedict waived the normal five-year waiting period so that his sainthood could be considered immediately and it was fast-tracked from there on in. The benefit of the church’s traditional slow march to sainthood was that it removed the canonization of any individual from the politics of any particular papacy. You really had…

The Agenda in Making John Paul an Insta-Saint

By Patricia Miller

…onized Sunday, died in 2005, making his nine-year march to sainthood the fastest in the church’s history. His successor Pope Benedict waived the normal five-year waiting period so that his sainthood could be considered immediately and it was fast-tracked from there on in. The benefit of the church’s traditional slow march to sainthood was that it removed the canonization of any individual from the politics of any particular papacy. You really had…

The Forgotten Struggle Over Gender and Bigotry in Christianity

By Stephen J. Patterson

…t of those who do not? Well, anyone can read those tealeaves. In today’s fastest-growing churches, the gospel is all about class. And gender? Simply put, the church is the last, greatest bastion of gender bias in American society. The Catholic Church does not ordain women as priests and probably never will. Neither do the Orthodox churches. The largest Protestant denominations do not ordain women as ministers, nor do most of the historically black…

Will Rand Paul Break the Religious Outreach Mold?

By Sarah Posner

…at’s more, the GOP playbook religious outreach might not even be the smartest strategy for a candidate with strong millennial support. A major survey of millennials conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that majorities of millennials in all major religious groups, except for white evangelical Protestants, believe that employers should be required to include no-cost contraception coverage in their health plans—showing they think…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…us mental “inference systems” which silently channel a sensory deluge into steady streams of consciousness. Inference systems aren’t perfect. They can over-fire, like when we impose faces onto objects. More significantly, bad inferences can produce cognitive biases like racial prejudice. Our blame inference system seems to be socially motivated, driven by a desire to defend communal rules against cheaters who might game the system. When something…

Rand Paul: We Wouldn’t Need Laws If Everyone Were Christian

By Sarah Posner

…edom.) On the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, in 2004, the elder Paul stated on the floor of the House, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society.” (h/t Rachel Maddow’s twitter feed). Many Christian Reconstructionists believe certain forms of slavery are biblical. As I wrote in a post las…