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Conservative Christians Insist the Toxic Theology Portrayed in the Duggar Family Doc is ‘Fringe’ — But is it Really All That Different?

By Caroline Matas

…er of Joshua Harris, whose 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye made waves in American evangelical purity culture. Alex Harris—a lawyer who has clerked for both Justice Anthony Kennedy and then-Judge Neil Gorsuch—tweeted that he participated in the docuseries to tell the story of his own family’s involvement in the movement to “take America back for God” and to explain how his own religious views have shifted over time. In a review of the docuseries…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…ave asserted the Christianity of Mormon belief for national audiences, the number one reaction has come from Christians who seek to correct my understanding of my faith and remind me that Mormons are not, in their eyes, Christians. Some assert that they’ll be praying for my mistaken soul (and the soul of my Jewish husband too). Others seek to engage in a friendlier conversational exchange about whether Mormons profess the Nicene Creed. (We do not…

New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

By Nicole Greenfield

…Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret. If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which ended up resulting…

Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

By Daniel Schultz

…mpanion kept 95.7% of it.) It’s possible this is part of a larger trend. A number of paragraphs down there’s mention of a long-delayed vote on the future of the denomination, which might lend credibility to the headline, but no details are given, so it’s not possible to evaluate the claim. Likewise, near the top of the story comes a paragraph with a quote from an RCA pastor about the financial difficulties this will create. Does he speak for the d…

Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

By Marian Ronan

…mpanies now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at least, are related to the use of pesticides. It seems that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is already aware of—and opposed t…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…ion or function of the brain, it must not be real. The article points to a number of ways neuropsychology has been overinterpreted and oversold. Rosenbaum addresses the fetishizing of fMRI images, the ideology that conflates causation and correlation, and the shifting semantics — evil recast as “non-empathy” by one esteemed psychologist (echoing, interestingly, the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation). But it’s the image of…

The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

By Ismar Volić

…isit into the fun and valuable experience of spending my senior year in an American high school, wait things out a little. I hated the idea. All I wanted to do was go back to my band and my friends. But deep down, I understood that staying was the sensible thing to do. So I stayed. In April 1992, as I was getting ready to graduate from high school, the war reached Bosnia after a referendum on its independence. Serbia’s barbaric aggression, of a ma…

Obstacles for Secularists

By Sarah Posner

…ment for the Guardian. Waldman observes: But it won’t be easy for secular Americans to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us,…

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…roved enormously popular with Catholics world-wide. Many had hoped a Latin American leader atop the church would stem the slide in the region, which is still home to more than 425 million Catholics. “Catholics love Pope Francis,” said Neha Sahgal, a senior researcher at Pew. But “there’s currently no evidence that former Catholics are particularly enamored, or will come back to the Catholic Church. They seem to have made a pretty clean break.” In…

“One of Us”: Rick Santorum and the Politics of (Very Big) Family

By Kathryn Joyce

…claimed, “We win if we just keep having children, ’cause we’re going to outnumber them!”—a staple argument of the Quiverfull movement. Weeks earlier, Santorum had transformed this rhetoric into policy proposal at a South Carolina Fuddruckers appearance with the Duggars, where he argued that low birth rates and a declining American population (also longstanding concerns among the Quiverfull movement) should be fought by tripling the child tax deduc…