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U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…of abortion and euthanasia and excludes poverty and the environment.” The most aggressive revisions the bishops did make to “Faithful Citizenship” were to beef up references to their opposition to same-sex marriage, which now total nine, changes that National Catholic Reporter blogger Michael Sean Winters notes “clearly are designed to make it lean more to the right and to the GOP.” The final straw was the leadership elections. Four candidates fo…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…uth Colin B. Chapell University of Alabama Press September 2016 What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Theology and belief matter to how people view not only the world around them, but how adherents view their own identity. I know that this may sound simple, but we so often forget this. Indeed, I would enlarge that statement to say that the values people hold dearest change how they understand their own identity. If academic achi…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…couples, both in intent and in practice. The lesbians in the study were almo*]}*st painfully egalitarian—in some cases putting money in jars and splitting everything down to the penny in a way, Schwartz says, that “would have driven me crazy.” Many unmarried heterosexual cohabitators were also careful about divvying things up, but lesbian couples seemed to take the practice to extremes: It was almo*]}*st like ‘my kitty, your litter.’” Gay men, like lesbi…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…history does shed light in the darkness, and the history of Halloween, as most readers here know, is primarily about collapsing the boundaries between the living and the dead. Most accounts begin with Samhain, a pagan holiday that marked the beginning of winter but also celebrated the migration of the dead to the next world. The pre-Christian Celtic cultures throughout Europe, Ireland, and England understood the period around November 1 as not ju…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…’s yoga would improve Iyengar’s physical state. It did. Iyengar became the most famous among the yoga prodigies and teachers to have studied under Krishnamacharya. After studying for three years with his guru, Iyengar moved to Pune, where he developed his own postural yoga system that was informed by Krishnamacharya’s approach and techniques as well as increasingly refined biomedical understandings of the body. Beginning in the 1950s, Iyengar attr…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…a defensive posture neutralizes the legal force it’s exerted since Dobbs. Most importantly, people motivated by religious beliefs to have, assist, or provide abortions deserve the same constitutional protections as those afforded to conservative Christians. As abortion rights defenders in Iowa and elsewhere navigate an increasingly restrictive legislative environment, RFRA challenges are only likely to increase—and they have the critical benefit…

Mormon Rejection of Trump Embarrassing for Evangelicals?

By Neil J. Young

…ich. Trump’s Utah loss follows his earlier defeats in the second and third most Mormon states, Idaho and Wyoming, where he lost to Cruz by 18 and 59 points, respectively. To add insult to injury, a recent poll conducted by the LDS Church-owned Deseret News found Utah would vote for a Democratic candidate in November over Trump. Utah hasn’t sided with the Democrats since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide election in 1964. Why have Mormons rejected Trump?…

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

By Richard Flory

…are looking for in church, this shift represents a failure on the part of most churches to provide a message and organizational structure that will both attract and retain church members. This will likely continue, but will churches adapt by figuring out what people want in church, or will they continue to stagnate and decline? On the other hand, what alternative forms, if any, of “church” might people be forming to replace the religious communit…

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

By Anne Eggebroten

…t Believe in God It’s not that the faithful are leaving the Church—for the most part, they aren’t. It’s that the hierarchy itself is cracking. “What I would like to see is actually Christian honest people running the shop,” said Sinead O’Connor, speaking on CNN about her faith as a Catholic woman and the need for governmental change in the Church. “It seems to me that the Vatican don’t actually believe in God at all. They’re certainly not acting l…

The Faith Outreach Canard

By Sarah Posner

…owing against a party, it’s the incumbents in the swing districts that are most likely to be blown out of office. And his colleague Eric McGhee notes that 2010 looks like a reverse of 2006 — when Democrats made big congressional gains at a time when a Republican president was falling out of favor. Sapp, in his post-election lament that the Democrats didn’t listen to him enough, blames these losses on the Democrats’ lack of faith outreach. But as t…