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Religion vs. Science: America’s Perilous Fight

By Edward J. Larson

…more on blind faith than on personal experience: the existence of atoms or Adam? That last one may be a close call, but countless Americans do claim to feel a personal relationship with Jesus. How many claim to feel a personal relationship with evolution? For most Americans, God is more real and more important than evolution. Scientists fight religion at their peril. Religion addresses the great questions. Why are we here? Where did we come from?…

In the Papal Pocket: Benedict XVI and the Press

By Mary E. Hunt

…xpect a great deal of airtime and print space, very little if any critical analysis, and a lot of free press for the Roman Catholic Church. I follow these issues as a cradle Catholic and a feminist theologian. My biases are clear: I love the community of sacrament and solidarity of which I am a part, and I take serious exception to the institution’s free ride in the press. The complexity of contemporary Catholicism—especially the fact that million…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…ight be dying. The movement’s putative founder, Rev. Jerry Falwell, passed away last year, and several other original movement leaders, especially Rev. Pat Robertson, are far less politically relevant today than they were in their heyday. We now hear comparatively little about religious right interest groups, and the once-powerful Christian Coalition is a brittle shell of its former self. Quite a few books recently have appeared that call for or p…

Trump the Totem: Like Other Fascist Leaders, Trump has Turned from Man to Symbol — And That’s the Danger

By Robert P. Jones

…nk now he’s seen as a symbol, a symbol of one who is willing to fight back against that corruption, the deep state and all the rest.” Given any number of other statements by Johnson, this comment may seem unremarkable. But the transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the MAGA movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidif…

The Story Behind the Catholic Church’s Stunning Contraception Reversal

By Patricia Miller

On this 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s historic encyclical, Humanae Vitae, Religion Dispatches reaches into the archive to bring you the surprising story of its controversial conclusions on birth control, originally published in 2014. Years later, when the remembrance of so many other things had faded, the memory still remained crisp in her mind. She saw herself lying in the hospital bed, bleeding, writhing in agony. She remembered clawing at…

Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle

By Michael Schulson

…ng to Eusebio, a voice came in the night, commanding him to rename himself Aarón, and to start a church of his own. That church would be la luz del mundo—the light of the world. (For these and other details, I’m indebted to scholar Renée de la Torre’s book Los hijos de la luz). In an apparent allusion to the story of Abraham, the divine voice told Aarón that he would soon be asked to go to “a land that I will show you.” Specifically, he was to set…

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

By Scott Blaine Swenson

Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, wasn’t exactly Hell—not for me anyway. Then again, I spent most of those 18 formative years hiding from Topeka’s foremost biblical authority, the infamous anti-gay funeral picketer, Reverend Fred Phelps. As a child I had a secret buried deep within and was convinced if what Rev. Phelps said was true—that “God Hates Fags”—then I must be the Antichrist. The fact that the US Postal Service assigned “666” as Topeka’s zip…

Rumors of the Suicide of the Liberal Church Are Exaggerated: A Response to Chris Hedges

By Mark Hulsether

…it has taken over the years. Many of its high-rolling trustees and donors abandoned it over its social justice stands in the 1960s, and neoconservatives have been trying to shovel dirt on its grave ever since. There is nothing new about this. UTS has sold off parts of its property several times in the past to stay afloat, and Columbia University has already taken over parts of its quadrangle. Will the current sale be enough to stop the bleeding?…

‘Religious Freedom’ Rally Sets Stage for 1st Amendment Collision

By Sarah Posner

…Ellicott City, Maryland constituent office, proceeded to read from the Declaration of Independence, using a small walkie-talkie as a makeshift bullhorn. “Our liberty, our freedom of religion, inalienable, granted by God, and enshrined in our Constitution, is under attack,” Hagen added, parroting the talking points of the national effort by anti-contraception activists who staged 140 simultaneous rallies across the country on Friday. Hagen, a waitr…

Lessons from the Defeat of the Oklahoma Personhood Bill

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…sure: As I’ve mentioned before in my coverage of SB-1433, I live in Oklahoma and have participated, in a volunteer capacity, in efforts to keep SB-1433 from becoming law.] Archbishop Coakley of Oklahoma wrote this letter to all the priests in his diocese urging them to advocate for SB-1433 at Mass on the Sunday before the anticipated floor fight. Well, there was a fight, but SB-1433 was never heard, and now the deadline has expired. In the afterma…