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American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…cy is not something we discuss very often. Our rates of incarceration, the number of states utilizing the death penalty, our obsessive clinging to the Second Amendment along with its deadly consequences, ICE raids on immigrant families fleeing even worse violence in their home countries, drone strikes, the environmental violence of fracking, deforestation and coal mining, and the daily threats faced by women, LGBTQ people and people of color are a…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…delights in surfacing little-known factoids. These include the remarkable number of commercial hucksters who were preachers or else preachers’ kids (e.g., Richard Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute? fame—a former Episcopal priest) and the equally remarkable number of notable preachers who had strong commercial instincts and/or commercial roots (ranging from 18th-century superstar evangelist George Whitefield to 19th-century revivalist giant C…

‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

By Catherine Wessinger

…desired collective salvation. On January 6, 2021, it probably seemed to a number of participants and supporters in the Euro-American Nativist Millennial Movement that they had finally achieved the critical mass of adherents to overthrow Congress. There are many varieties of millennialism. As I wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism: “A nativist millennial movement consists of people who feel under attack by a foreign colonizing government…

Religion and Other Animals

By Paul Waldau

…pirituality. In fact, “religion and animals” themes appear in a surprising number of places—one example is Peter Miller’s article “Jane Goodall” in the December 1995 National Geographic, in which he discusses Goodall’s belief that expressions of awe by chimpanzees at a waterfall site “may resemble the emotions that led early humans to religion.” The debate over whether or not our animal neighbors can be “religious” is but one issue in the growing…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…n part by denouncing her as a bigot and a racist who wanted “to reduce the number of children [born] to the nation’s poorest economic groups, which tend to be persons of color and other minorities.” The Pro-Life Action League made a similar criticism this week against the Guttmacher Institute, claiming that the Institute’s call for publicly-funded birth control “takes aim at the poor by recommending more government spending on programs to reduce t…

Evangelical Pastor Argues for Full LGBT Inclusion: “I Think It’s Inevitable”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…you to write this book? I had been doing a rethink on this question for a number of years and my convictions had changed but I didn’t know how to process it in the congregation at that stage. I had processed it with the church board and pastoral staff and different leaders. I was doing a lectio divina when I got the idea to write a letter to my congregation. I didn’t want to have congregational meetings to talk about how to handle this because th…

As Psychedelics Experience a Renaissance, Emory’s New Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality Seeks a Novel Approach

By Hollis Phelps

…sion, PTSD, and substance abuse disorders—as well as in palliative care. A number of prominent institutions in the United States currently host centers devoted to studying the mechanisms, effects, and efficacy of psychedelics, including NYU’s Center for Psychedelic Medicine, Johns Hopkins’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In addition, and anticipating the legal and socioc…

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

By Jay Michaelson

…ether in terms of kindness, or humility, or following their dreams, or any number of other positive values—just as it’s at its worst when it takes agency away. The particular myths that Tebow or Lin happen to believe in are secondary (and of course, I mean ‘myths’ in the sophisticated sense of stories that give meaning to human life, not false tales). What’s primary is that they believe, despite ample reasons not to do so, in the possibility of hu…

Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

By Aliyya Swaby

…n its religious composition, but a 2009 international report estimated the number of Muslims at around 24,000, comprising less than one percent of the country’s population. Most are of Lebanese, Palestinian or Indian descent. Though small, Panama’s Muslim community has grown increasingly ethnically diverse. The first Muslims to come to Panama were African slaves brought over by Spaniards in the mid-sixteenth century to work in the mines. Throughou…

The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ier might well have declared, offering data on the correlation between the number of pipers in a village and the number of butts in local church pews. Across the pond in the American colonies, religion was not faring much better. In his masterful reconstruction of American religious history, Awash in a Sea of Faith (from which the previous anecdote is drawn), Jon Butler reports that Christianity was “in crisis” in the New World: Pennsylvania aside…