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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…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…inced that this is a sizable community worthy of serious study. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? By studying vampires, we study ourselves. I am concerned that despite the best intention of many scholars, the term “new religious movement” (a label that has been applied to vampires) carries with it the subtext that a group is totally “other.” While it may be comforting to think that we are totally different from vampires, thi…

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…ation. For if you believe in heaven as a real place, a physical place (and most people do), then you need a body or something like a body with which to enjoy it. The critical verse here is 1 Corinthians 15, in which Paul explains to those who doubt the truth of the resurrection that the body is like a seed—and when it rises in the resurrection is both has the properties of a seed and of something else altogether. “What is sown is perishable, what…

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

By Mark Hulsether

…r,” the proportions aren’t any clearer. Sadly, even the least alarmist and most metaphorical reading remains deeply disturbing. Knowing what we do now about how easily Trump’s insurrectionists crossed the line to literal violence, the questions remain urgent. Rather than rework the earlier argument from the ground up, I bring it back here as originally published on January 21, 2010, with a few light edits for clarity. Insofar as times have changed…

Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

By Paula M. Cooey

…ample, attributed the earthquake to underground caves filling with gases.) Most folks found either of these approaches less than satisfactory. Today some historians see the Lisbon earthquake as signaling the end of the optimism of the European Enlightenment and the beginning of the anxiety and emotional excessiveness of Romanticism. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others?” Perhaps the best known response falls more into t…

Aasif Mandvi on Islamophobia, Acting, and the Long Shadow of Jon Stewart

By Haroon Moghul

This couldn’t be a more topical interview. Aasif Mandvi might be most famous for his hilarious commentary on The Daily Show, but he’s also a very well-regarded actor, creator, artist, and writer. At a time when we’re not having a debate about Islam and extremism so much as we’re slinging talking points past each other, Aasif Mandvi took time out of a very busy schedule to talk about Halal in the Family and much more. Namely: He teases us with gli…