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LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…e who writes about Mormonism for a general public, it’s my experience that most people actually know little about what we believe—especially how we relate to mainline Christianity. The Mormon movement was founded in the early nineteenth century by American Protestant “Restorationists:” people who believed that high-church Protestant sectarian schism and theological technicalities had obscured the original power of primitive Christianity and who so…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…Religion does not make sense as a set of strictly empirical claims. It is most definitely not right there on the page. It is not abstract and self-evident; it is concrete and wholly contextual. In this rather academic sense, scientists and priests are dissimilar. But this is often a distinction without a difference. As has been the case with priests in some times and places, there is in society a great faith placed in scientists. And as with prie…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…of their god. The single greatest motivator for these 98 subjects however most certainly was a fear-based one. In short, they were all living under the threat of hell. The thought of eternal damnation—a true, fiery pit where you suffer endlessly forever and ever, amen—can be a great motivator for the true believer. It can motivate people to stop smoking, drinking, swearing, wearing their hair long, or cheating on their spouse or income taxes. I…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…hristianity between how it was practiced in the Atlantic Archipelago (what most call the British Isles) and in Rome concerned the calculation for Easter’s date (the former timed it with Passover, as the Orthodox still do). There were some other differences as well, including the style of tonsure, or haircut, worn by Irish monks, but otherwise the faith as believed by Christians in northwestern Europe was the essentially the same as that promulgate…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…se” isn’t identifiably religious. Indeed, at first hearing, it can sound almo*]}*st appealingly feminist-ish. If you believe that misogyny is a real thing in the world, and that one of the hallmarks of misogyny is the notion that women’s bodies are gross and defective… well, a negative view of pregnancy seems like exactly the sort of data point you might expect, doesn’t it? Of course the forces of sexism would try to trick us into believing that pregn…

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

By Jeremy Biles

…flective bean-shaped orb in the art-filled Millennium Park, is perhaps the most popular piece on view, but Chicago also boasts pieces by Jean Dubuffet, Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, and Joan Miró. Most recently, Seward Johnson’s enormous (and widely maligned) sculpture of Marilyn Monroe in her famous Seven Year Itch pose has taken up temporary residence in Pioneer Court, the flare of her windblown skirt providing shade to spectators. But it is t…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…e commitments are seen as reflections of God’s will. And while a pull that strong still does not make heterosexual married life possible for many homosexually-oriented men, for those whom it does it is important to acknowledge that changing orientation and desire sufficiently to maintain one relationship with one person of the opposite sex is far lower a bar for successful change than wholesale shift in sexual desire. For some, preserving those re…

From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

By Daniel Schultz

…ices are among the largest regular gatherings in modern society, among the most physically intimate, and likely include the greatest number of vulnerable people. Even single members of large congregations can have a dramatic effect on how coronavirus spreads or doesn’t, as South Korea found out the hard way. While many aren’t meeting at all or are streaming services, some churches that do meet feel like they need to support those who need it, in w…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…. These words ring hollow with the daily revelations of sexual abuse cases—most recently the New York Times’ exposé on the deaf children abused by Father Murphy in Wisconsin. The exponential spread of documents and stories surrounding clerical sexual abuse, from Wisconsin to Munich, has put the Vatican in a defensive posture against the media, circling the flaming wagons around its impervious leader. Making matters worse, the Pope tried to deflect…

Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

By Brock Bahler

…hs disposable—in Netanyahu’s case, the deaths of over 11,000 Palestinians, most of whom are women and children. Colonialist logic is tragically simple: deploy religious narratives to describe the other as savage in order to justify savage acts upon them. The founding myths of America regularly draw from a legacy of settlers who utilized religious language to portray Christian colonialism as a civilizing process in order to justify violence against…