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Now That ‘Serial’ is Over: 2014’s Best Podcasts about Religion

By Andrew Aghapour

…position. Visit the You Made it Weird channel at Nerdist.com to pick from any of a wide number of fun and thoughtful interviews. For a crash course on Holmes’ own religious beliefs you can listen to this interview with Emergent Church pastor Rob Bell. Category Winner. When it comes to conversations about religion, Krista Tippett’s On Being is the gold standard. The Peabody Award-winning radio program is also available as a podcast, and subscribers…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…like child pornography or threats of rape? Who makes that decision? How many people can a company be expected to employ to review these requests when they have other legitimate business concerns as well? Debates on these questions could fill volumes, and these are the easy ones. Some questions are, broadly, ideological. For accounts or Tweets sympathetic to, or acting as amplifiers of, Muslim ‘extremism’ that don’t specifically incite or promote…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…recent one in support of gay rights. We might call this strategy “the tyranny of the minority.” Through the “small Church” ecclesiology of Benedict, many Catholics are already being encouraged to take their spiritual business elsewhere. We have seen an increase in the number of American politicians who are asked to remove themselves from communion lines and, recently, priests have even denied parishioners communion if they vote for a political can…

Turkish Police Move Against Activists Who Defied Pride Ban; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s. There is a lot of aggression toward us and we cannot be open in public anymore.” The proposed bill emboldened a number of radical nationalist movements and, according to activists at Labrys, a gay activism group in Kyrgyzstan, led to a near 300 percent increase in attacks against the community. Activists fear things will get worse once a Russian-style anti-gay “propaganda” bill gets its final reading in parliament and becomes law; a restrictive…

Mike Johnson isn’t Just Your Average Christian Right Avatar — He’s Influenced by Fringe Movements Unfamiliar to Most Political Analysts

By Annika Brockschmidt

…ose in relationship to God. But combined with Johnson’s statement that if anyone wants to know what he thinks about any issue they should look at the Bible suggests to me he means that in a much more literal sense. I see him as one who believes that the Bible speaks to every area of life and culture who embraces a way of reading the Old and New Testaments together to derive positions on the entire range of issues a modern government confronts. Thi…

“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…historical tradition helps tap you into the big thing, which goes beyond any tradition, now you’re onto something. The Exodus story: when people want to argue about whether or not it happened, and we don’t have any scientific evidence, I just say, “Yeah but the story has given people tremendous hope to work to rescue others, to organize for the liberation of those who are being repressed.” Are there epistemological differences between a Biblical…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…ons in the US with over 2 million members, though the significance of that number is unclear since, as the priest in the church where I was baptized once teased me: “when you’re baptized we have you; you’re ours and you don’t have much to say about it.” Recent reports indicate that about 350 congregations have departed to affiliate with more conservative Anglican Bishops outside the US. Whether the remaining congregations are better off or not…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…e fully justified in appealing to President Trump, the Supreme Court, and any other elected or appointed official on behalf of their constitutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…ing was. I can’t imagine a writer having that relationship to a community anymore. The form of this book covers a number of different genres, including commentary, exegesis, polemic, and memoir. Was there a model in mind? No, I didn’t have any model. The books about Jesus that I went to were either very, very personal and not analytic at all, or very analytic and not personal at all. I was trying to mesh those two voices. I let the stories steer m…

PCUSA’s Nod to “Traditional” Marriage Understandable, but Not Accurate

By William E. Smith

…ical “tradition” of Christian marriage as one of development and change. Many of these developments, furthermore, continue to shape a number of the assumptions American Christians have about the nature of marriage. Consider the following examples of historical changes in Christian marriage and whether we can honestly still call today’s version “traditional.” 1) Were individuals always required to be conventionally alive? For the majority of the pa…