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Rapture Theology as Cultural Critique: What Camping’s Prediction Tells Us About Ourselves

By Rosamond C. Rodman

…f everyday social, political, and family life. Note, for example, that the New York Times focused their coverage of the prediction through the lens of the Haddad family. The parents actively prepared for the end on May 21, while the kids thought the whole thing ridiculous (but got a trip to New York out of it). Inadvertently, their coverage revealed what rapture and other religious rhetorics can produce: social and familial re-engineering. Harold…

Will a New Dawkins Foundation-Sponsored App Help Atheists Talk to Believers?

By Alana Massey

…ve ones are wrong. If user reviews are any indication, Atheos has been instructive to several non-believers who sought structure and resources for their conversations. Atheist blogger Courtney Heard wrote a glowing review on her site, Godless Mom, where she described what a great learning experience the app was. “It’s not just taking me through common conversations that I get frustrated with frequently, but it’s also proving, with each step furthe…

Sex, the Body, the World: It’s R. Crumb’s Bible Now

By Naomi Seidman

…b’s elegant onstage interlocutor, Françoise Mouly, the art director of The New Yorker, who began by confessing, “You know, Bob, I never actually read the Bible before you showed me your illustrations,” to which Crumb gamely answered, “No, of course not, why would you?” For those of us who were reasonably familiar with both the Bible and underground comix, the experience was not of being introduced either to a new artist or to an ancient literary w…

As Catholic Bishops Punish Dissent, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Life and Legacy Show the Way Forward

By Lauren Barbato

…lics for Choice (then known as Catholics for a Free Choice), the full-page New York Times advertisement declared “a diversity of opinions regarding abortion exists among committed Catholics.” Many theologians, the statement read, believed abortion “can sometimes be a moral choice.” Feminist theologian Margaret Farley, novelist Mary Gordon, and then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo were among the signers. More than two dozen ordained persons also endorsed…

Pope Mum on LGBTs in Uganda; Church Defends Anti-Marriage-Equality Efforts in Australia; Cyprus Passes Civil Partnerships; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nnot simply “nudge off” the LGBT community. More from Joe Williams at Pink News: Arun Jaitley says that the country must reconsider the “conservative” ruling made by the Supreme Court in 2013, as it ignores the needs of “millions of people” across India. “When you have millions of people involved in this (gay sex) you can’t nudge them off,” he stated. He added that India’s approach to gay rights needs to be modernised, arguing that the law would h…

Chocolate Will Make You Thin! Or: How Should We Trust Science?

By Michael Schulson

…d not suspect and discover the fabrication of the survey data,” Green told New York magazine, whose coverage of the situation has been excellent). Princeton offered LaCour a faculty position. It took six months after the study’s publication before David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, graduate students at UC-Berkeley, publicly identified the fundamental issues with a landmark study in a major field of social scientific inquiry. The second case is even…

A New Book By Esteemed Sociologist Robert Wuthnow Struggles to Show ‘Why Religion is Good for American Democracy’

By Peter Laarman

…igious sentiment lined up on this question on account of my own efforts in New York to call out then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s especially cruel version of “welfare reform” during the Clinton years, once Clinton had muscled through his Reagan-inflected “personal responsibility” bill in 1996. I was roundly denounced by ostensibly progressive clergy colleagues—and by several ostensibly liberal newspaper columnists—for getting my morals wrong; these disti…

The Exorcist Files, Getting Mad at God, The Obama Prayer…

By Michael J. Altman

…ices, Romanian witches are threatening to hex the government. The state of New York has eliminated its entire kosher inspection division. New York Rep. Peter King is promising to use his new position as chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security to hold hearings about Islam in America. Record numbers of Brits are converting to Islam, according to a new survey. Opponents of Scientology in Chicago are fighting for the right to protest outs…

Untethering Conscience From Religion: An Interview with Louisa Thomas

By Jeremy Kessler

…different from his father’s. Norman went to Union Theological Seminary in New York. Being a minister is what his parents wanted him to do; going to UTS was not what his parents wanted him to do. Union was a bastion of liberal Christianity, of the “social gospel.” The social gospel movement promoted the idea that society should abide by what Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount, that love should be the animating force of human interaction. It…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…s too much. The power of this trope played out in 1996, when a reporter in New York vanished while doing a story on the vampire community. As I describe in the book, she was almost certainly killed by the Russian mafia. There is a certain romance in imagining that she was taken by vampires, but it is irresponsible to promote such a theory. I have encountered several cases of vampires suffering harassment, and this may become worse as awareness of…