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“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…thing for it to be a trend. Wait. What’s this? From Ina May Gaskin, earth-mama midwife and not-Roman-Catholic hippie commune cofounder, in an excerpt from her March 2011 book, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta: [P]regnancy is not an illness in need of treatment, and nature’s design of women is not considered flawed. (emphasis mine, again. I am very emphatic.) And we have a meme! But let’s consider this claim more closely. I don’t mean for this…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…o. What does this mysterious sculpture depict? Popular answers include: an aardvark, a bird, an Afghan hound, and one of Picasso’s lovers. But to my eyes, it looks like a sphinx—a monster that (like the anamorphic skull haunting Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors) only snaps into focus when viewed from an oblique perspective. To perceive the recumbent sphinx you have to approach the piece not from the front, but from behind and to the…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…avor of sexual identity. But, after years of studying and writing about reparative therapy and the ex-gay movement, and after reading Rich Wyler’s own account of his sexual conversion, I found NPR’s story, and Schumacher-Matos’ defense of it, shallow and dispiriting. Married with Children There is much to criticize in the story, and much to attend to in the responses to it. Warren Throckmorton, Candace Chellew-Hodge, and Joanna Brooks have all rai…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…ersion therapy on Monday. Today, NPR’s ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, analyzed Monday’s story in light of the negative reaction from listeners. Briefly, Alix Spiegel interviewed Rich Wyler, founder of Journey into Manhood, and Peterson Toscano, a man who went spent 17 years in an unsuccessful effort to change his orientation. Schumacher-Matos correctly points out that much of the negative reaction centered on the presentation of Wyler and Tos…

Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

By Sarah Posner

…out with a slideshow of 10 faces of the Christian right — a movement the magazine says is evolving. It’s apparently evolving so much that it includes people who aren’t associated with the Christian right. Ten is a pretty small number to best represent a movement Newsweek describes as “changing and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-…

New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

“How do I know who the true God is?” Alber Saber Ayad’s question was answered by the Egyptian government last week when the 27-year-old computer science student was convicted for “contempt of religion” in Cairo. Saber was taken into custody on September 13 by the police after an enraged mob stormed his house, beating him and threatening his mother, a Coptic Christian. Saber was rumored to be circulating the Innocence of Muslims film trailer on hi…

From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

By Daniel Schultz

…vulnerable people. Even single members of large congregations can have a dramatic effect on how coronavirus spreads or doesn’t, as South Korea found out the hard way. While many aren’t meeting at all or are streaming services, some churches that do meet feel like they need to support those who need it, in worship or otherwise. My mother’s congregation in Madison, Wisconsin elected to close for a week or two, but also voted to continue to allow Alc…

The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…s being discussed, debated, and delineated through commemorative concerts, academic conferences, books, box sets, and a feature-length documentary film. A special series on religion and culture produced in collaboration with the Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern California This new body of scholarly literature and pop cultural production reveals the Grateful Dead as a uniquely American phenomenon with an extraordinary American…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…buse, from Wisconsin to Munich, has put the Vatican in a defensive posture against the media, circling the flaming wagons around its impervious leader. Making matters worse, the Pope tried to deflect from the mounting worldwide criticism with a stab at his detractors during his Palm Sunday homily, stating “Jesus leads us toward the courage not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion.” I beg to differ, but this se…

Why Don’t White People Show Up For Juneteenth The Way They Showed Up For George Floyd?

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…ul discussions of race and slavery, Americans by and large are woefully incapable of coming to terms with what slavery was and what slavery wrought upon America’s descendants of slaves and slaveholders (and all those in-between). So, the surrealness of people essentially greeting each other “Happy End of Slavery Day” is almost like a skit from Chappelle’s Show. A second observation from my Juneteenth sojourns is that White people do not attend Jun…