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

By Richard Flory

…e neighborhoods where they are located. These churches tend to think of themselves as a family environment that is as much focused on its surrounding neighborhoods as it is on its own members. Even megachurches are getting in on the act by establishing 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 g…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…Ireland, in which he bashed the secular world, his meeting with abuse victims here in the United States, and the whining about the press giving him a bad rap, this Pope is toast. Whether he resigns or not, his Papacy legacy is in tatters historically, unless he can pull off an amazing change of heart, and language. At 83 years of age, that is hard to do. At the very least he should certainly heed the calls for an emergency synod to deal with the s…

The Faith Outreach Canard

By Sarah Posner

…a whopping 20 point decline with Catholics. But there are two major problems with this argument: first, it’s factually inaccurate — the numbers are simply wrong. While Democrats experienced significant losses compared to the last mid-term election in 2006, which was a good year for Democrats across the board, Sapp overstates the losses by a factor of two. The actual decreases in support between 2006 and 2010 for Democratic candidates in the House…

Special Hell: Progressive Catholics Reckon With the Rise of Trump

By Patricia Miller

…itically. One source of dismay for some Catholics is that so many of their number broke decisively toward Trump and were critical to his victory in the Rust Belt swing states. “The Catholic vote went for Trump and many Catholics joined the non-voting defectors. That’s a scandal that calls into question the moral standing and integrity of most—not all—Catholics today,” Marquette University moral theologian Dan Maguire told RD. To many, Catholic sup…

55% of Utah Mormons Believe LGBT People can “Change”

By Joanna Brooks

…ientation, while 20% thought it possible, and 14% were unsure. Which confirms what those of us who live within the culture know: many, many LDS people live in a parallel universe when it comes to the reality of LGBT experience. Just a few weeks ago, I was visiting with a friend who has a gay adult child. We discussed the nuances of the recent events surrounding Elder Boyd K. Packer’s abrasive and controversial October conference talk which asserte…

The Devil is in the Details

By Amina Wadud

…balanced). I’ve taken out cash for travel with the knowledge that using ATMs abroad is always a great way to get the best rates. Yep that’s right. The U.S. always considers its own currency to have slightly greater value than the local money changers and banks. They consider their own currency to have the greater value. So I lived in Indonesia for a year and a half without ever getting a local bank account. At this point the ubiquitous ATM is one…

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

By Patricia Miller

…thin the Church itself. Catholicism didn’t become less “distinctive”—in terms of having the coherent political identity Catholics had in the days of JFK—because the political system forced it on them. Catholics’ divergence into conservative and liberal factions was created by the church itself, initially by the nonsensical Humanae Vitae encyclical. The church’s decision to ban birth control despite the recommendation of Catholic theologians and co…

Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

By Paul Wallace

…ith every outward step, as our universe and our ignorance grows, so do the number of potential space alien hideouts. So does the belief that there must be someone out there. So every time I read about the discovery of a new Earth-like planet or read about NASA’s upcoming Kepler planet-finding mission or watch a movie like Contact, I grow excited over—and, like Brahe, even a little afraid of—the vast unknown. My mind boggles. What’s really out ther…

Commies, Blacks, Jews, the UCC and Other Threats to America

By Daniel Schultz

…ous left. It means we’re doing our job. And just in case anyone missed the number of religious progressive groups endorsing the rally, here’s a list culled from One Nation site. Their list of endorsers is pretty long, so I apologize if I missed somebody: Rainbow PUSH Coalition The Shalom Center Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations Sikh Coalition The Religious Institute The Community Church of NY Unitarian Universalist Pennsylvania C…

Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

By John W. Morehead

…quently address witchcraft during the month of October through radio programs, websites, blogs, and newsletters. Unfortunately, the portrait they paint tends to rehearse various mischaracterizations, including a confusion of witchcraft with Satanism, accusations of ritual sacrifice, evangelical exaggeration of the size and growth of witchcraft, and a misreading of fantasy, fairy tale, and horror depictions of witches as reflecting real-world pract…