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Episcopal Church Divided Over Trinity’s Denial of Occupy

By Elizabeth Drescher

…f human sexuality might invite the dismissal of his insight by progressive American Anglicans, morally unimpeachable Archbishop Desmond Tutu offers, in a letter yesterday to OWS, a more specific plea to Trinity Wall Street leaders to make space for the protesters: I appeal to them to find a way to help you. I appeal to them to embrace the higher calling of Our Lord Jesus Christ—which they live so well in all other ways—but now to do so in this ins…

Of Personhood and the Pill: What’s at Stake?

By Atlee Parks Breland

…servation is a necessary part of IVF. Doctors aim to retrieve approximately 10 eggs from a woman undergoing IVF, knowing that only 25% will fertilize and develop into embryos which can be transferred back to the mother. In a typical cycle, two embryos are transferred, to give the mother the best chance at getting pregnant at all without risking high-order multiples. However, this isn’t an exact science. There is no way to know in advance how many…

God Wants You to Work Harder, and to Stop Complaining

By James Dennis LoRusso

…to where the jobs are. In this socioeconomic stew, workplace spirituality offers the individual a stable community where ultimate meaning and purpose become anchored to his or her place of employment. Workers feel more fulfilled and empowered on the job, and, therefore, will freely work harder and more productively, the theory goes, while ignoring more material concerns such as declining wages and diminishing benefits. Workplace spirituality neat…

Romney Betrays Harold Bloom’s Fantasy Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…my estimate, the dread-to-insight ratio in Bloom’s tedious essay runs about 10 to 1. Few would argue that the faith Mormons live today is as Joseph Smith imagined it, and I know plenty of Mormons who regret the corporate shape and bureaucratic priorities of the contemporary LDS Church. But successful religions do age, after all. And blaming the emergence of Mitt Romney on Mormonism’s abandonment of its original nineteenth-century fervor is like bl…

Participant Discredits the Original Ex-Gay Study

By Warren Throckmorton

…, E.M., & Pattison, M.L. (1980). “‘Ex-gays’: Religiously Mediated Change in Homosexuals.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 137, 1553-1562….

Praying to the Zombie Jesus: The Spirituality of Horror

By W. Scott Poole

…ly, “Southern Baptist Church.” This blooper aside, the scene in the church offers us something exceedingly creepy and provocative, with zombie parishioners sitting almost meditatively in the pews. A zombie woman wears a pre-Vatican II (and now, traditionalist) prayer veil. This represents, of course, another religious imagery epic fail in the Southern Baptist context but still makes for a wonderfully unsettling tableau. Religious faith in the worl…

Does Christopher Hitchens Think Mormons are Sinistererer?

By Joanna Brooks

…. People of African descent were ordained to the Mormon priesthood from the 1830s through 1880s, and although ordination was discontinued and institutionalized as a racist ban until 1978, but the Book of Mormon provides no direct rationale for LDS anti-black institutional racism. And no Mormon who understands vicarious baptism for the dead believes that the simple act of proxy baptism actually converts the souls of the dead into Mormons. The pract…

The David Lane Effect

By Sarah Posner

…between Lane and Bott took place after the Values Voters Summit, on October 12, with after-the-fact praising of what Jeffress had done. (Lane: “Getting out Dr. Jeffress [sic] message, juxtaposing traditional Christianity to the false god of Mormonism, is very important in the larger scheme of things.”) Coppins suggests that because Lane played a role in some pre-Response meetings among leading religious right figures, that he must have coordinated…

Meet the Real Mitt Romney

By Joanna Brooks

…ss went on a media-spree hurling the pejorative term “cult” at millions of American Mormons, the Daily Beast’s McKay Coppins has unearthed evidence that Jeffress may have been encouraged by Perry campaign supporters.) The Times article offers a nuanced look at Romney’s thirteen years of service as a congregational pastoral leader (bishop) and regional administrator and pastoral leader (stake president) in Belmont, Massachusetts, during which time…

What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…er the debates they helped initiate. Take Tertullian. Born in approximately 160 CE in the North African city of Carthage, he was a pagan until middle age when he converted to Christianity. He became more and more emphatic in the faith—the zeal of the convert—and separated himself, first by joining an extremist sect called the Montanists (a group later declared to be, you guessed it, heretical), then by breaking from them and forming a Christian co…