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Most U.S. Catholics Back Marriage Equality, But Knights of Columbus Pour Millions into Opposition

By Peter Montgomery

…aigns. How do progressive Catholics respond to the combined forces of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the money machines that are the Knights of Columbus and NOM? “What we have on our side is the belief of the majority of American Catholics,” says Dignity’s Duddy-Burke, noting that more than half of American Catholics support marriage equality. She says “It is not consistent with the gospel for any segment of the church to be using mil…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…even a vague sense of danger during this research. There is a trope in American horror of the dedicated researcher who uncovers too much. The power of this trope played out in 1996, when a reporter in New York vanished while doing a story on the vampire community. As I describe in the book, she was almost certainly killed by the Russian mafia. There is a certain romance in imagining that she was taken by vampires, but it is irresponsible to promo…

Anger, Privilege, and Invisible Injustice: What Cain and Abel Have to Do With Ferguson

By Eva Mroczek

…rciful. Surely the writer of the Targum was not predicting 21st century America, but perhaps we can read his words as a comment about privilege, and how the privileged interact with the marginalized. In this centuries-old text, we can see an uncomfortably familiar pattern where denying that injustice exists deepens and amplifies that injustice. This is where the translator is far more than a pious interpreter—he refuses to rehabilitate baffling bi…

Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…“Christ figure.” In the immortal words of Woody Allen, “If Jesus came back today and saw what was going on in his name, he wouldn’t stop throwing up.” It is safe to say that Allen’s comments can be applied to a lot of religious film criticism. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? As with the above point the main audience is, I hope, students. I tried to write this in an accessible way, introducing key themes in religious studies…

Jesus Hates Taxes: Biblical Capitalism Created Fertile Anti-Union Soil

By Peter Montgomery

…t guest of broadcaster Glenn Beck, is using his newly enlarged audience to promote American exceptionalism (America was created by its divinely-inspired founders as a country of, by, and for Christians) and Tea Party-on-steroids economics (Jesus and the Bible oppose progressive taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and minimum wage laws). The religious right has a long practice of claiming divine mandate for its policy agenda as it makes for a…

Ordain Women Transforms Mormon Feminism

By Holly Welker

One year ago today, Ordain Women celebrated the creation of the Relief Society on March 17, 1842 by launching its website with 19 profiles of individuals calling for the ordination of Mormon women. Today it has more than 250 profiles—and has completely transformed Mormon feminism. I continue to be impressed and pleased with the extremely thoughtful work Laurie Goodstein and Jodi Kantor are doing on Mormon women. I recommend a conversation on “The…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ted later in the fall. But it does suggest, even at this early stage, that the “decline in religiosity” reported in surveys such as we’ve seen this week misses much of significance in American religious and spiritual life today. It teaches me, at least, that what counts in the study of religion is often far beyond what we can count….

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…rospect of Barack Obama as the first president of the United States with African American ancestry is a thrilling possibility for so many, yet also cannot be disassociated from America’s shameful slaveholding past and the ghosts of so many Africans who died so that slavery might live, and African Americans brutally killed as a result of prejudice, hatred, and injustice. In our enlightened, scientific age, we don’t believe in the existence of ghost…

High Ark: A Geologist on the True Meaning of Noah’s Flood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…prised to find that the flood stories found around the world may have historical basis. In some cases the folk stories read like filtered down eyewitness description. But just because there were big floods in lots of different parts of the world—we need to have a complex, adult conversation about this. Creationists like to point to the similarities in flood stories around the world [as evidence that they are all describing the same, worldwide, ca…

How a Group of Catholic Pacifists Took on the Nuclear State

By Eric C. Miller

…ra resonance for activists who model themselves after Jesus and other historical and Biblical martyrs. The courtroom provides an arena for Plowshares activists to decry nuclear weapons. Plowshares activists are there precisely to talk about what they’ve done. But the courtroom is also a highly regulated space. Almost always, the rules of the courtroom prevent Plowshares defendants from speaking freely about nuclear weapons and about their motivati…