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

By Richard Flory

…religious scandals—whether financial, sexual or both. Beyond the general distrust of large-scale institutions and the disconnect between politics, culture and what people 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 churc…

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

By Anne Eggebroten

…hose higher up and obedience to the rule of secrecy. Now we have “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in Church history,” declares the National Catholic Reporter in an editorial. The New York Times, which broke the story of abuse at the deaf school in Wisconsin, quotes a priest in Berlin as saying the crisis is “the worst in 100 years or more.” They Act Like They Don’t Believe in God It’s not that the faithful are leaving the C…

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

By Joanna Brooks

…S LGBT people who have knees bruised and calloused from so much praying. Most straight LDS people have not grappled with the reality of LGBT experience. And another thing that has not happened yet in most LDS communities is a frank and searching discussion of the scriptural and doctrinal basis for opposition to the full equality of LGBT people. Are we still holding on to Old Testament stories about Sodom and Gomorrah which have been reexamined by…

Special Hell: Progressive Catholics Reckon With the Rise of Trump

By Patricia Miller

…of Catholic Bishops’ recently-concluded annual meeting, they elected Galveston-Houston Archbishop Daniel DiNardo, an outspoken advocate of immigrant rights, as president, and Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, a Mexican immigrant, and prominent support of immigrants, as vice president. At the same time, says Krueger, the bishops are “acting in a very pragmatic way to develop a relationship with the Trump administration [at the expense of] losing…

The Devil is in the Details

By Amina Wadud

…y are supposed to be better protected. You can get them 100% replaced if lost or stolen, but only if you first write down each and every serial number. Then you have to keep this information somewhere that’s not the same somewhere you keep the checks. But then they really do NOT spend just like cash—especially abroad where we meet and mix with people in their own places. Such places are not subject to our being guests there. So I do tend toward ke…

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

By Patricia Miller

…most vulnerable: the aged, the infirm, the disabled and the unborn. This last line is straight from John Paul, demonstrating the extraordinary cross-pollination that occurred between the pope and the Christian right on the issue of abortion. But it’s the first part of this formulation that should attract notice. It was George W. Bush, when he was running for president, who talked about “creating a culture of life.” But in Bush’s formulation it was…

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

By Paul Wallace

…early, it is we—not black holes, not dark energy, not quasars—that are the strangest things in the cosmos. Through this reversed telescope we see many interesting beings on that small blue planet set squarely in the midst of the habitable zone of its ordinary yellow star. And among them is a creature called Brother Guy Consolmagno. There he is, talking to his fellow creatures about the possibility of space aliens needing to be justified before God…

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

By Daniel Schultz

…is paragraph: On Thursday [Glenn] Beck warned that the march included Marxist, Communist and revolutionary groups. Among the organizations endorsing the march were the Communist Party USA, the United Church of Christ, Jewish Funds for Justice, the National Urban League, the National Baptist Convention, People for the American Way and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. My first reaction to this was to wonder why the Times is acting as Glenn B…

Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

By John W. Morehead

…s, asking some thorny questions in the process. Consider Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from corpses by his master as a means of empowerment. Dr. Frankenstein is quickly repulsed by his creation for which he wishes to take no responsibility. The rest of Mary Shelley’s story is devoted the disastrous results of Frankenstein’s creation, not only due to the doctor’s decision to create such life, but also in his later refusal to take respon…

We Were Here Before September 11th

By Amina Wadud

…lims). The one constant in that picture was African-Americans. Ours is the story still not well known, despite our numbers. For one thing, after September 11th we were given a small reprieve. American prejudice and intolerance floated from us as African Americans, who happen to be Muslim, and focused on Muslims who happen to be Americans. Therefore the hatred built up against foreign Muslims immigrant and their offspring. More than a few African-A…