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New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…for 18 years with children who experience family transitions — like foster care — or who live with single or divorced parents, or in blended families.” Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin gets right to the point about the study’s fatal ﬂaw: “The study compares the children of married biological parents with those from broken homes — and the study’s “lesbian mothers” that our opponents are vilifying generally weren’t married to each other; nor were…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…anasia), vocations and ongoing formation (shoring up the rapidly declining number of priests and nuns) and, of course, religious freedom (Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who arranged Kim Davis’ meeting with Pope Francis, received two standing ovations from the bishops.). Then the debate turned to the USCCB’s quadrennial “Faithful Citizenship” voting guide. The bishops had voted earlier to revise the 2007 edition prepared for the 2008 election, whic…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…the husband a better cook. But, research by scholars, especially gay ones, carries little weight with those who oppose marriage equality on religious grounds. For them, I point to a growing number of religious leaders who also understand that gays and lesbians can do a lot to “redefine” marriage in beneficial ways. Rev. Ed Bacon, who leads the 4,000 member All Saints Church in Pasadena, Calif., told Oprah Winfrey this past weekend that marriage wo…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…oked. There are ghosts and graves in the yards of my neighborhood, and the number of skeletons—reclining on lawn chairs, sprouting up from the ground, beckoning from the shadows—has transformed the suburban landscape into a set for a George Romero film. In addition, and beyond bland suburbia, monsters, ghosts, skeletons, vampires, and other playful dead inhabit stores and sell products, entertain across the television dial, and instill a dreadfull…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…hich functioned as the center for teacher training, greatly augmented the number of yoga teachers who received official training in Iyengar Yoga and became the headquarters from which to disseminate the Iyengar system. Today, there are thousands of Iyengar Yoga teachers and millions of practitioners in over seventy countries across the world. Some yoga advocates and pop culture critics have suggested that popularized yoga reflects only the impuls…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…religious text prohibits adherents from providing contraception in a healthcare insurance plan for employees. As such, while Jewish plaintiffs have been at the forefront of challenging abortion restrictions on religious freedom grounds—assuming a significant burden in doing so—a religious right to abortion isn’t limited to those who can point to Jewish law, or halakha, in their claims. As our brief illustrates, a wide range of religious beliefs ca…

Mormon Rejection of Trump Embarrassing for Evangelicals?

By Neil J. Young

…ghpoint, but rather as members of a heretical and unchristian faith. For a number of reasons, including Mitt Romney’s presidential run in 2012, those impulses have been largely diminished. But evangelical worries about Mormonism remain. That Mormons have so thoroughly repudiated Donald Trump while American evangelicalism wrestles with its complicated relationship with him only elevates evangelical leaders’ concerns about the strength of their fait…

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

By Richard Flory

…ken a much more adversarial stance to LGBT acceptance. However, increasing numbers of evangelical churches are accepting LGBT individuals as members. This development is not without its opponents, however. Many evangelical organizations—most significantly colleges, universities and seminaries—are mobilizing to retain their “religious right” to discriminate against LGBT individuals. More than 30 evangelical higher education institutions have petiti…

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

By Anne Eggebroten

…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 women will assume more and more administrative and other posts, and the hypocrisy of refusing to ordain them will become increasingly apparent. The house of cards will fall…