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Before Oprah, There Was the “Hour of Power”: Crystal Cathedral Pastor Robert H. Schuller Has Died

By Cathleen Falsani

…thinking—or, as he prefers to call his theology, “Possibility Thinking.” — Los Angeles Times, 1983 Richard Mouw, former longtime president of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., who now serves there as a professor of faith and public life, was a close friend of Schuller. “He was the one of the great religious leaders of the 20th century using his wonderful, therapeutic messages,” Mouw told public radio station KPCC’s “Air Talk” program Thursday a…

The Christian Roots of the New Age: The Aquarian Gospel

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ing was born in the Midwest, in Bellville, Ohio, he moved later in life to Los Angeles, California, which is where he wrote down The Aquarian Gospel. The year was 1908, and he died just three years later. When he died, a new Christian movement was in the offing, right there in Los Angeles, one aimed explicitly against the very kinds of Liberal Protestantism so well embodied in The Aquarian Gospel. That new-old style of Christianity called itself “…

The Higher the Dome, The Closer to God: “Megachurches” Explores the Arid Architecture of America’s New Sanctuaries

By Anita Little

…s aren’t too concerned with blending or subtlety, as a recent project from Los Angeles-based artist Lisa Auerbach shows. For “Megachurches,” Auerbach spent several years touring the United States and taking pictures of churches—exteriors only. While flipping through the photos online or in one of Auerbach’s outsized “megazines,” you might think the only thing that distinguishes these places of worship from a Walmart Supercenter is a cross adorning…

The Role of Spirit in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement: A Conversation with Activist and Artist Patrisse Cullors

By Hebah H. Farrag

…s-Brignac. Recently dubbed one of the nation’s top civil rights leaders by Los Angeles Times, named a NAACP History Maker in 2015 and one of the three founders of #BlackLivesMatter, Cullors is a person dedicated to not only transforming how her community is treated, but how her community organizes and understands itself. She is a queer polyamorous practitioner of Ifà, a religious tradition from Nigeria, and a person many people turn to not only as…

When a Pride March Means Owning the Shame of Racial and Economic Injustice

By Peter Laarman

…ou say, but this is all changing now, right? The Trump phenomenon is bringing us together in a united front for the freedom and dignity of all persons, right? I wish I could believe it. We will see how it goes. I will certainly be marching in Los Angeles on June 11. But somehow I can’t envision West Hollywood’s powerful gay white men doing a whole lot of sustained resisting when their unacknowledged core values—white supremacy and the rule of weal…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…lical background, Meaghen O’Gieblyn’s essays in places like The Point, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Believer (among several others) probe the false dichotomy between the secular and the religious with rigorous astuteness. Interior States collects several of those essays into an anthology where the overarching theme, as provided by the pun of the title, is what it means to be a post-religion millennial living in the Midwest who still ha…

James Dobson’s Family Values Were Influenced by a Eugenicist [Audio]

By Bradley Onishi

…iety’s decay and all of this. He would often write for newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. And, just like Popenoe, he viewed homosexuality and feminism as these grave threats to the family. He would dismiss domestic abuse—that’s something that appears in later of his books. He would sometimes accuse women of faking it, just to get attention, that sort of thing. Even where he believed abuse was real, he never really thought of it as a good reaso…

In the Age of Megachurches, Sometimes Less Is More

By Richard Flory

…ere aren’t urban megachurches in this mix as well. I could list several in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, or any other large metropolitan area, that are attracting large numbers of young, college educated congregants. Yet in many cases, these churches represent the problem faced by any mass event: it is easy to attend, and equally easy to avoid deeper commitment to the life of the church. The point is that what is often missed by these large scal…

How Herbalife’s Gospel of Health and Wealth Fuels a Billion-Dollar Deception

By Michael Schulson

…ized. Hughes started the company in 1980, when he was 24 years-old. As the Los Angeles Times explained in a 2001 article, Hughes intended “ to start his own operation that would combine the Eastern philosophy of herbal medicine with the vitamin and mineral technology of the West.” By 1985, the company had $423 million in sales. Hughes gave motivational talks to his sellers. These talks took on the aura of sermons. They “were part revival meeting,…

In Trump Era, Young Muslims Question Respectability Politics of Mosques

By Hebah H. Farrag

…ligious creativity, the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture has seen Los Angeles’ young Muslims create “third spaces” such as the Ehsan Center and the Women’s Mosque of America—spaces that operate outside the norm of what a traditional mosque looks like. Across the country, I have talked to young American Muslims who are disaffiliating entirely from formal institutions and participating in community-building in new ways. In the course of thi…