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Breaking Up with God: I Didn’t Lose My Faith, I Left It

By Sarah Sentilles

…a nonprofit that uses the resources of design to solve social problems, visited my brother’s class in architecture school and described one of the first design contests he held. He asked people to come up with the best design possible for a mobile AIDS clinic for a town in a country in Africa. He posted the deadline, and he waited. He didn’t think anyone would submit anything, but on the day of the contest’s deadline, a delivery man from Federal…

Trump’s Evangelical Support in the Gut, not the Theology

By Donovan Schaefer

…ly ugly and offered with a sneer. The irony is that the candidates who are best at affect-masking this year (Rubio and Kasich) are falling behind. They seem moderate, which would make them palatable in November. But the Republican rank and file—including a plurality of right-wing evangelicals—don’t want politicians who seem moderate. They want the masks off and the lights on; they want double the fury, double the contempt, double the fear. Trump’s…

From Empire to Shire: Rod Dreher’s Nostalgia for Middle-Earth

By Gustavo Maya

…e plain, it becomes obvious that the debate over the new traditionalism is best construed not as a debate between traditional and modern varieties of ethical discourse, but rather as a debate involving at least two traditions or strands of modern ethical discourse: a tradition dedicated to a very narrow conception of how traditions ought ideally to operate and a tradition dedicated to the project of loosening up that conception democratically and…

Believing in Johnny Cash: An Open Letter to Atheists

By Paul Wallace

…way, we cannot avoid believing in stories. We can only hope to choose the best ones. How to do this? I propose that good stories are stories that tell the truth, and bad ones are ones that do not. I fear that I may have lost some of you just now. In particular, most atheists I know would be quite critical of the idea that stories are related in any meaningful way to the bedrock truth about the world. So in the interest of keeping everyone on the…

Convergence of Far-Right, Anti-Democratic Factions in the Northwest Could Provide a Model for the Rest of the Nation

By Frederick Clarkson and Cloee Cooper

…7-8. The event featured such notable figures as Rev. Scott Lively, perhaps best known as an advocate for the notorious “Kill the Gays” legislation in Uganda, and retired Army Major, Stephen Coughlin, a former high level military intelligence analyst and Fellow at the White House National Security Council. The publications of Coughlin’s think tank, Unconstrained Analytics, argue that Black Lives Matter in conjunction with ISIS, Antifa, Neo-Marxists…

Evolution Challenged in ‘Textbook’ Case: As Goes Texas, So Goes the Nation

By Lauri Lebo

…Now he says he’s merely interested in making sure students are taught the best science standards from the best science textbooks. After the “strength and weakness” wording was rejected, McLeroy launched into an impassioned speech during the recent hearings about the fossil record. He spoke of the “sudden appearance” of life forms during the 70- to 80-million-year-period known as the Cambrian Explosion and evolutionary stasis, in which life forms…

Paul Ryan Is Like Jesus, But It’s Not What You Think

By Sarah Posner

…released a video attempting to defend his views against Evangelii Gaudium. Best “who, me?” line: “Who is advocating a market without regulations, without law?” On the Eternal Word Television Network program The World Over last week, Bishop Robert Morlino, the bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, discussed a portion of Evangelii Gaudium in which the Pope writes about welfare and a “welfare mentality.” It seems fairly clear that Francis isn’t being Reagane…

Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

By Eric Reitan

…o the concept of unconditional love. Unconditional love isn’t earned. It’s bestowed as a gift. But for those who’ve grown to measure their worth in terms of their accomplishments, unconditional love may be an unwanted gift. It’s this fact, for Browning, that ultimately perpetuates our alienation from God. Where God offers unconditional love, and invites participation in a community defined by such love, we want the world to be ruled by a law of “t…

The Sacred and the Dead: I Love You More than Words Can Tell

By David Vanderveen

…knees and stop, drop and roll roll roll out of that broke-down palace. The best thing I got from Wheaton was lifelong friends—and finding a place to live in community, doing life, raising our families, becoming more fully ourselves as the years pass. Together. Mark grew up in Laguna Beach, Calif., and after college, returned there to start his own family. One of the many things he taught me was the importance of place. Where you choose to live mat…

The Battle for the Meaning of Religious Freedom Day

By Frederick Clarkson

…om may very well determine the future of democracy in our time, just as it did in the 18th century. As historian John Ragosta told RD last year: A republic could not work if government and church officials… were trying to control what we think or prescribe what was the ‘best’ religion or which people were the ‘best’ citizens based upon their religious beliefs. If people were to make informed political choices themselves, they had to be free to thi…