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Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply what the Chicago Picasso might depict—dog, aardvark, woman, or whatever. The riddle of…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…actices of the spouse of an actual presidential candidate in the United States of America in 2011. And I think: keep those complaints coming. * homo-intimacy in the ex-gay world is far more suspect among lesbians, for whom excessive emotional closeness is considered a sign of lesbianism even in the absence of a sexual relationship….

Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

By Sarah Posner

…ople who aren’t associated with the Christian right. Ten is a pretty small number to best represent a movement Newsweek describes as “changing and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal sch…

An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

By Anne Eggebroten

…ign? Will he even order a Church-wide investigation? Unlikely. Instead, his moral authority will continue to erode. The number of priests will continue to dwindle. Catholic women will assume more and more administrative and other posts, and the hypocrisy of refusing to ordain them will become increasingly apparent. The house of cards will fall….

Dispatch from Charlottesville: “It Was a War Zone. It Felt Like There Were a Million Nazis.”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…at was marching peacefully down a narrow street. I spoke with Dr. Robyn on Monday morning, asking for their first-hand account of the chaos white supremacists unleashed on Charlottesville this weekend. Henderson-Espinoza was clear about the roots of this violence, and particularly the silence—from the Trump Administration and white clergy members—that continues to embolden neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and proud racists to terrorize communities,…

Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…c? There’s a lot of exciting work being done right now around marriage, as more and more feminists (women and men) look at the harm done by the traditional dynamic in Jewish divorce (which relies on the husband’s willingness to divorce and can leave a woman trapped in the marriage), as well as many of the ways that the Jewish wedding ceremony itself inscribes inequality from the get-go. There are a lot of organizations advocating for the rights of…

American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

By Richard Flory

…ing franchised outposts in different local communities that are somewhat remote from the mother church. The difference between the megachurch franchise locations and the more independent congregations generally tends to be in terms of resourcing (the mega franchises have more) and content (mega franchise churches tend to deliver the same product as the home church). However, the presence of smaller, remotely located mega franchises indicates that…

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…ing number of evangelical Christians agree with me.) At the same time, the most moving and culturally important visions of heaven are those created by the conservative believers. These are the visions that move people to action: to be faithful to One God, for example, or to martyr themselves. I would like to believe in heaven as a concrete reality in the future, a place that really exists, as the medieval monks imagined, somewhere on a map if you…

Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

By Mark Hulsether

…—an extreme loose cannon—underplay continuities between him and relatively more moderate conservatives, making allies with roughly similar ideas seem like lesser evils. So I wondered whether to acknowledge Robertson’s latest provocation. It bores me, and I feel cheapened even to think about it as I worry about one of my students who has not yet returned from a mission trip to Haiti. Still I could not resist clicking on a list of Robertson’s top te…

Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

By Paula M. Cooey

…ose of us steeped in scriptural traditions that emphasize a highly anthropomorphized, personalistic, moody, and mighty God, those of us who approach these texts “literally.” So, for example, Pat Robertson, appearing on CBN, attributes the earthquake, along with a history of natural and social devastation in Haiti, to a slave revolt based on a “pact with the devil.” He calls the earthquake an event that could be a blessing in disguise for the Haiti…