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What The Church Needs More Than a ‘Good Pope’

By Mary E. Hunt

…exity arises from the overlay of Ignation spirituality that forms Francis’ spirit and psyche. It’s a language and symbol set all its own—heavy with “discernment” and reliant on prayer as a means of knowing. The interviewer tries to interpret it at times (who knew that Peter Faber [1506-46] was such an influential fellow?), but what stands out is how Francis is imbued with the customs and governance style of the Society of Jesus. The notion of a “…

Pawlenty Stars in American Civil Religion: The Movie

By Michael J. Altman

…al purpose for our country to spread its influence around the world. In the 19th century, Manifest Destiny meant expansion out west. In the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson used it to back up American intervention in WWI. While the term itself fell out of political usage, the myth expanded as America spread its reach to the moon, to Vietnam, and to the Middle East. If we are exceptional and if we work the hardest, than surely we deserve to grow….

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for violent suppression of “the mob.” The Catholic hierarchy was less prone to such nativist excesses and yet harbored deep reservations of its own about organized labor. Even as the Vatican articulated growing support…

American Missionary Could Face Genocide Charges, But Brazil’s Indigenous Communities Have a Bigger Problem

By Amy Fallas

…st Alexander Hinton, Brazil’s indigenous groups decreased by up to 80% from 1900 to 1957 due to “disease.” In fact, advocacy organizations such as Survival International and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs formed during the 1960s in response to this drastic depopulation and widespread violence against native groups in the Amazon. These organizations, along with FUNAI (founded in 1967), continue to advocate against over-extracti…

It’s Official: White Evangelical Support for Romney Not Dampened by Mormon Factor

By Joanna Brooks

…als said they “strongly favored” Romney, and about 30% said they had “some reservations”—proportions just about equivalent to those reported for Romney voters overall. In the voting booth, partisanship trumped sectarianism. As we knew it would. But according to the Pew enthusiasm for Romney overall lagged behind the enthusiasm of Obama voters, seventy percent of whom said they “strongly favored” the president. Perhaps Romney’s team is to be credit…

Profits Over Principles for Romney?

By Joanna Brooks

…such sermons and lessons. Certainly, as a missionary in France when he was 19-21, Romney would have warned investigators of Mormonism who were using tobacco that they could not be baptized without completely quitting their tobacco habit. But in his business life Romney was willing to promote products which he knew to have a deleterious effect on users. As a consequence of Bain and other companies’ promotion of Big Tobacco, cigarette use in Russia…

Repurposing the Gospel Aura: Eminem’s Chrysler Ad Borrows Some Spirit

By Douglas Harrison

…f postmodern pop cultural contexts: There’s the final chorus of Foreigner’s 1984 power ballad, “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” which features the New Jersey Mass Choir. The choir’s warm, expansive harmonies take a garden-variety power ballad (“I wanna know what love is / I want you to show me… / Aaaah woah-oh-ooh”) and transform it into a secular anthem of the ever-yearning heart. There’s U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” on the 1988…

Are Creationist Beliefs Too Extreme for Creationists?

By Paul Wallace

…o be different, and they are, but down deep their roots converge. The same spirit of curiosity that animated Newton, animated Darwin. It is this spirit of inquiry that is at issue, not certain showpieces of scientific end-product. But it is unthinkable for Ham or the Discovery Institute to publicly reject “the spirit of inquiry,” so they focus — as they do so often — on externals, and wind up accepting only self-selected pieces of science. They ar…

Beyond the Miniskirt-Wearing Nun: What Catholic Reform Looks Like

By Colleen McDannell

…isagreement and dissent, and most importantly, it created an atmosphere of spiritual and social flexibility essential to meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century. The reception of the reforms was quite uneven across the country, and so we need to be careful in describing what actually occurred. Anything you had to leave out? I visited every parish I discussed in the book, beginning with my great grandparents’ ancestral villages in German…

Rodriguez on Nativism in the GOP and Socially Conservative Latinos

By Sarah Posner

…ld at the university in April 2010, Rodriguez maintained that white evangelicals need black and Latino evangelicals to succeed: “Let me be very blunt here. I don’t believe white evangelicals or white conservatives alone can repudiate the spirit of Herod, the spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah, the spirit of Jezebel.” Rodriguez may be leading a new movement, but if he is, it’s a pretty narrow one: social issues culture warriors disgusted with the GOP’s o…