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Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ho “had been forced out of the church to which he had devoted his life.” “Prior to the election of 2012 and the Pussy Riot case, there was no huge pressure on alternative groups within the church. After the presidential election and that case, things changed,” he says. Until last year, Sverdlov was a parish priest in Pavlovskoe, a Moscow suburb. But it wasn’t his activities with his congregation that got Sverdlov into trouble—it was his sideline a…

How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

By Christopher D. Cantwell

…ity of teams are on display. There’s a certain irony here, in that an Anglophone movement that once saw itself as uniquely positioned to save the world is now looking to the globe to salvage its reputation. But it’s also indicative of the historiography that Noll, Marsden, and Bebbington helped found. In the rush to find the metaphor that best describes what evangelicalism “is,” few have asked what the term “evangelical” itself might be a metaphor…

New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

By Chrissy Stroop

…ics of Gender, Pronouns, and Public Education.” The overall positions of various demographics are mostly what you would expect them to be. The report singles out White evangelical Protestants multiple times as, unsurprisingly, America’s most singularly anti-trans demo. In 2021, for example, 86% of White evangelicals said there are only two genders, with that number rising to 92% in 2023. The report also states, “Among White Christian groups, White…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…declaration: “I swear to maintain and defend the social and political superiority of the White Race on this Continent; always and in all places to observe a marked distinction between the White and African races; to vote for none but white men for any office of honor, profit or trust; to devote my intelligence, energy and influence to instil these principles in the minds and hearts of others; and to protect and defend persons of the White Race, i…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…f current political candidates—Mitt Romney’s first name is Willard, and Marriott was a close friend of Mitt’s father George Romney—the changes in office led to some speculation that the move was motivated by the Church’s desire to underscore its stated non-involvement in the Huntsman and Romney campaigns. Church spokespeople, however, described the changes as a routine “rotation.” Signs that the Church is eager to be understood better by the gener…

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

By Paul Wallace

…ion or function of the brain, it must not be real. The article points to a number of ways neuropsychology has been overinterpreted and oversold. Rosenbaum addresses the fetishizing of fMRI images, the ideology that conflates causation and correlation, and the shifting semantics — evil recast as “non-empathy” by one esteemed psychologist (echoing, interestingly, the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation). But it’s the image of…

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

By Ed Simon

…han reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any number of manifestations, from a community like Iona to the shelves of New Age bookstores. Bradley argues that although the idea of a historical Celtic Church may be an exercise in “wishful thinking, romantic nostalgia and the projection of all kinds of dreams about what should and might be,” it’s also a “vehicle through which people have chased their dreams… of deeper spir…

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

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…disease or serious illness if one considers pregnancy to be a disease or serious illness. Pregnancy is not an illness or disease, nor are children the side effect or the unintended by-product of disease. (emphasis mine) Hm. Could it be that Laird is friends with Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops? I ask only because Cardinal DiNardo said, in a statement abou…

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

By Jeremy Biles

…—dog, aardvark, woman, or whatever. The riddle of this sphinx is more mysterious. It is the riddle of the limitlessness of interpretation itself. Philosopher of religion Jean-Luc Marion describes great works of art, particularly religious icons, as “saturated phenomena.” In their “overwhelming givenness,” they exceed our intentional intuitions; they endlessly call for, but are never exhausted by, interpretation. Chicago cabby George Downs expresse…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…k, baring [his] soul,” the intensive male community he found in the New Warriors training and various support groups. “The irony,” he writes, is by the end of therapy, “I felt more bonded and connected to men and manhood than I had all of my life.” It is tempting here to resort to salacious clichés about what must be going on behind the closed doors of ex-gay ministries. But even when sexual abstinence is achieved, the emphasis on homo-intimacy in…