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Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…the right circumstance to have a baby, a pregnant person has the inherent spiritual authority not to call that particular future into being. Religious freedom law protects religious practices regardless of whether they’re mandatory in any religious tradition or derive from formal religious doctrine. After all, no religious text prohibits adherents from providing contraception in a healthcare insurance plan for employees. As such, while Jewish pla…

Mormon Rejection of Trump Embarrassing for Evangelicals?

By Neil J. Young

…d and third most Mormon states, Idaho and Wyoming, where he lost to Cruz by 18 and 59 points, respectively. To add insult to injury, a recent poll conducted by the LDS Church-owned Deseret News found Utah would vote for a Democratic candidate in November over Trump. Utah hasn’t sided with the Democrats since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide election in 1964. Why have Mormons rejected Trump? As Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins explained over the weekend, while M…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…and brimstone preachers of science), the film manages to build a case that: 1) it is un-American to omit discussion of intelligent design from Science and the science classroom and 2) ‘belief’ in evolution logically leads to atheism and even the Holocaust. Yes, you read that correctly, the Holocaust. The movie gets so much wrong here—in the science, in the framing of the issues, even in over-dramatizing and misrepresenting the cases of the ruined…

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

By Anne Eggebroten

…lture of extreme secrecy has prevailed, codified in Vatican norms issued in 1962 requiring secret investigations and prohibiting any report to civil authorities. Will Pope Benedict XVI set in motion any change to canon law? Will he step down or ask any complicit bishops to resign? Will he even order a Church-wide investigation? Unlikely. Instead, his moral authority will continue to erode. The number of priests will continue to dwindle. Catholic w…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…The last time religious influence was deemed to be in sharp decline was the 1960s. Political protests along with cultural upheavals left many wondering about the future of traditional institutions. But during the Reagan years, and especially following 9/11, the significance of religion—its association with social stability, community cohesion, and traditional values—raised appreciation for its influence. The upshot? The perception of increased rel…

The Devil is in the Details

By Amina Wadud

…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 keeping travel cash in an odd place. (No, I’m not gonna share with you…

More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

By John Wigger

…the Bakkers flaunted their wealth. Bakker raised about $158 million between 1984 and 1987 from his “lifetime partners,” but still managed to leave the ministry teetering on the edge of bankruptcy when the scandal broke. But there was more to it than just big hair and money. Before PTL could become a front-page scandal it had to have an outsized presence in American culture. That largely happened through innovation, including the Christian televisi…

Lo and Behold, the Sacredness of the Internet

By Martyn Smith

…rld we take more and more for granted (which feels like an updated form of spiritual warfare). When we collectively dream of a positive future for humanity it often begins to look like the interplanetary human existence proposed by Elon Musk. But does the story of the internet need to be told with all these religious resonances? A visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (down the street from the Googleplex) uses thousands…

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

By Patricia Miller

…edge issue. But even before John Paul, the U.S. bishops’ conference had, in 1976, meddled in electoral politics when they pronounced themselves “encouraged” by Gerald Ford’s abortion views while they were “disappointed” by Carter’s. The U.S. bishops’ conference nevertheless retained a significant center-left faction throughout the 1980s. These bishops continued to emphasize social justice concerns like the abuses of capitalism and militarism in Ce…

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

By Paul Wallace

…hese outward steps. Tycho Brahe, a well-known Danish astronomer of the late 16th century, rejected Copernicanism not only because it contradicted the Aristotelian physics of his day, but because it increased the size of the universe by several orders of magnitude. In Brahe’s view, Copernicus’ Sun-centered model expanded the gap between Saturn (at the time the highest of the planets) and the sphere of the stars to outlandish proportions. God, he re…