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Don’t Call It “Prayer Shaming”: Our Moral Failure Exposed

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…ds for deliberate political inaction by elected officials. The theological commentary on this shooting is what my grandmother would describe as “too heavenly minded and no earthly good.” These conversations about prayer reflect a graver moral issue than “prayer shaming” during a time of tragedy. Since the beginning of this year, 12,223 people have been killed in gun-related incidents in the U.S. and the number of people fatally shot by American po…

Grassroots Faith: The Lessons of The Social Gospel

By Christopher H. Evans

…hat sometimes the certainty of our convictions need to yield to the circumstances of our existence that work against the achievement of a just world. Social movements, whether religious or secular, need their irenic voices that value the importance of compromise, as they also need the voices of uncompromising radicals. However, there is a reason why many progressives today still honor the legacy of Walter Rauschenbusch. As religious progressives s…

Death Without Religion

By Gordon Haber

…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….

New Doc Strives for Christian Unity—But What if Unity is the Problem?

By Noah Berlatsky

…And yet, mostly despite itself, it ends up demonstrating the ways in which compassion, welcome, and faith can be weaponized as political tools against marginalized people who stand outside the circle of compassion. Unity is never universal, which means that when people call for unity, the first questions should be: unity for what? and: unity against whom? When Christians today start talking about the need to bridge divisions among themselves, LGBT…

Fasting and Faithy Friends of Convenience

By Sarah Posner

…y wasn’t in the cards. To add insult to injury to the “religion industrial complex,” as Digby calls it, the services of the small number of political strategists who peddled the Democrats-need-to-talk-more-about-religion theory are apparently no longer wanted by the Democratic Party. Never mind whether Democrats finally got good at “talking about their religion,” as if that were the only measure of whether a religious person would want to vote for…

The Story Behind the Catholic Church’s Stunning Reversal on Contraception

By Patricia Miller

…cussion. In 1963, Pope John XXIII, who had succeeded Pius XII, appointed a commission that would eventually comprise fifty-five members, including five married Catholic women, theologians, priests, and physicians, to study the question of whether the church’s teaching on artificial contraception should be changed. There is some indication that he created the commission as a way to isolate the incendiary issue of birth control from the Vatican II p…

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

By Michael Schulson

…of 30 in order to follow a pair of ascetic pentecostal preachers. He was accompanied by his wife, Elisa. A few months later, according 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…

How Religion Shapes (or Doesn’t) Our Views on Public Issues

By Daniel Schultz

…most important influence on their views.” One wonders where the other 40% comes from. Likewise, social issues come in dead last on a list of voter concerns. It’s not even close. Even more startling, however, just 7% of respondents said that religion is the biggest influence in their thinking about immigration. And only 6% say the same thing about the environment. That’s despite the messages they’re getting from the pulpit: about 1-in-4 said they’…

Did North Carolinians Vote Against their Own Beliefs?

By Peter Montgomery

…their families and deny them equal rights as citizens. The second saddest number comes with its own silver lining. Public Policy Polling reported on Sunday that most North Carolina residents believe that gay couples should have access to some legal protections. But because most voters didn’t understand just how extreme and far-reaching the amendment before them today was, they would vote for it to “protect” marriage. According to PPP: In some sen…

‘It’s a Gay Problem,’ and Other Myths From the Catholic Church’s Sexual Abuse Crisis

By Joelle Casteix

…orientation has anything to do with sexual abuse. Period. In fact, when it comes to adult men who sexually abuse boys, researchers have found that it doesn’t even make sense to label these men as “homosexual,” since they neither possess an adult sexual orientation nor do they tend to show a preference for gender. When apologists cite “the gay problem” for the ongoing crisis—what Bishop Robert Molino recently called the “homosexual subculture”—thei…