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Obama’s Gay Marriage Support Shocks Black Church

By Anthea Butler

…s, stunted sexuality, homophobia, and sexual abuse are competing for issue number one in their churches; at many, they are tied at the number one slot. It is high time to for the leaders of the black church to ‘put away childish things’ and to engage in a real conversation about sexuality, same-sex marriage, and the homophobia embedded in the black church community. Pontificating and posturing props up preachers, and does little to edify congregat…

Hobby Lobby: Key to a More Liberal and Less Religious America?

By Rebecca Sager

…te hearts and minds, and moving people out of the pews across America. The number of nones (people with no religious preference) is on the rise, with over 20% of all Americans claiming this status, and many point to the increased politicization of religion as the cause. This trend of legal victories will, in the long run, very likely create a more secular America. Recent data indicate that this process is already clearly under way. A poll just rel…

Faith-Based Bailout Part 3

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…t markets. The subtext of story number one, which will likely become story number two in the next day or so, is the partisan sniping that has already consumed the issue. A conservative core of House Republicans now claim, with a semi-straight face, that a partisan floor speech from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually turned them against a bill they came prepared to vote for. The speech “was” partisan—in the extreme, and far too much so for my tast…

Religious Leaders Need ‘Empty the Pews’ Which Chronicles the Darker Side of the ‘Nones’ Phenomenon

By Kaya Oakes

…stical data on Nones, compiled by the sociologist Ryan Burge—and a growing number of books exploring the narrative stories of Nones have appeared in recent years, including a book of my own. Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O’Neal Epiphany Publishing November 29, 2019 What many of these articles and books share in common is a sense of confusion or despair. The primary question they ask is often framed in the…

Bonnaroo Dispatches: Stages

By E. David Morgen

…oday. No one is going to judge you.” Recent studies suggest that while the number of young Americans who consider themselves religious or spiritual remains roughly constant, their spiritual practices are changing. They are more likely than their parents to consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular practice, or the version of the religion they practice boils down to injunctions to a vague sense of morality, fairness, and happiness, what…

A Match Made in Hell: Demons Have Become a Serious Force in US Politics — But We’ve Seen This Show Before

By Michael E. Heyes

…lculations, one-third of evangelicals don’t vote, and when you factor this number against the number of votes needed to tip battleground states like Pennsylvania, there’s not much convincing that needs to be done to turn the election for Trump. It might seem like a small affair, until you realize that JD Vance was one of the speakers at the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania. Predictably, demonic rhetoric underlies a lot of the Tour. From what I’v…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…ew thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of examples of the culture of physical improvement. For instance, in the chapter on aging, I nixed a rather lengthy critique I’d developed of Deepak…

The Messiah is Not Coming

By Peter Laarman

…umbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it…

Like a Virgin

By Donna Freitas

…forthcoming in April from Oxford University Press on the subject), I met a number of evangelical Christian young women who had “repackaged their virginity” (as one woman called the process). I wonder how dismissive and cynical people would be after hearing some of their stories? There was nothing funny about these young women’s sexual identities. Yes, my feminist radar went up and pushed me to simply critique what, at least on the surface, sounded…

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…th me about various protective talismans and ghostly premonitions. After a number of the patrons had shared such anecdotes, one Japanese man asked me, curiously, if these sorts of things didn’t go on in America. Before I could answer (and describe America’s own enchantment), a European patron jumped in, assuring everyone that Japan was much more spiritual and magical than the West. He looked to me to confirm the sentiment, which I did my best to r…