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PCUSA’s Nod to “Traditional” Marriage Understandable, but Not Accurate

By William E. Smith

…lowing examples of historical changes in Christian marriage and whether we can honestly still call today’s version “traditional.” 1) Were individuals always required to be conventionally alive? For the majority of the past two thousand years, Christian women could marry Jesus, who (in most Christian theologies) cannot be said to be a regular human, since he is also fully divine, nor be considered alive in any standard sense of the word. During the…

A Peek Inside the ‘Onion’ of Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…no help. He ultimately killed himself. It was different than the McPherson case because no one attempted to help. They wanted nothing to do with him. Do they let these people go because they fear legal trouble? Right, they don’t want legal trouble. See, Scientology is always supposed to “work.” It’s supposed to make you better. If you’re not better, if something goes wrong, they see that as your problem. It’s not their fault. They think you’ve c…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…n are threatened. Indeed, as scholar Lila Abu-Lughod points out, even Americans who are not feminists—often on religious grounds—seem ready to fight wars in the Middle East, ostensibly in order to “save” oppressed Muslim women. Moreover, I tend to agree with Muslimah Pride that the freedom to strip is far from the pinnacle of women’s liberation. (I much prefer the freedoms to speak and write, to work, to vote, to parent, to own property and the li…

How Fitbit Helps a Conservative Evangelical College Monitor Students’ Bodies For Christ

By Jonathan Root

…ieve that ORU is infringing on students’ privacy. As it turns out, Fitbits can record calories burned during sex—which created a minor scandal in 2011 when users realized that their sexual activity could be discovered through a simple Google search. This puts ORU students in an awkward position, argues Keri Paul, since their university prohibits premarital sex. Is this the story, as the media narrative would have it, of a naive Christian college g…

Fasting and Faithy Friends of Convenience

By Sarah Posner

…tails the Family’s storied history of union-busting in the service of biblical capitalism). As Sharlet told me in a 2008 interview, the Family’s founder, Abraham Vereide, was opposed to the social gospel, believed that unions were a form of disobedience against God, and had a vision at the height of the Great Depression: “God doesn’t want to have soup kitchens or social welfare programs, God doesn’t like what FDR is doing.” Bittman, for his part,…

Scottish Episcopal Church Angers Conservative Anglicans With Embrace of Same-Sex Marriage; and more in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…a largely conservative Christian population, is similar, though not identical, to that in Cayman.” Panama: Lawyers for religious groups file opposition to marriage equality at Supreme Court Álvaro José López, who married his Panamanian partner in the U.S., has asked the Supreme Court of Justice to declare that the restriction of marriage to a man and a woman is unconstitutional. More than 145 lawyers have registered their support for the restrict…

Demonized and Demonizing No More.

By Joanna Brooks

…to model that by moving away from talking about these issues in a theoretical way and grounding them in real-world experiences. What’s been the reaction to your work? When the book first came out, there were some early negative responses—from atheists in particular. As time has gone on, I have been able to see my book and the response to it as part of thriving and ultimately heartening conversations both within the atheist community and between a…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…pal congregations in the US with over 2 million members, though the significance of that number is unclear since, as the priest in the church where I was baptized once teased me: “when you’re baptized we have you; you’re ours and you don’t have much to say about it.” Recent reports indicate that about 350 congregations have departed to affiliate with more conservative Anglican Bishops outside the US. Whether the remaining congregations are bett…

A Question for Hobby Lobby Supporters…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…

Oklahoma Bill Would Violate Basic Freedoms, Rewrite the Ten Commandments

By Andrew L. Seidel

…gainst state-sponsored atheism that has caused society to go downhill. One can practically feel the flying spittle. And more importantly, none of this is accurate. The claim that our laws and Constitution are based on “Judeo-Christian” values—a problematic phrase, particularly in this context—are debunked in The Founding Myth, in which I also argued that the Ten Commandments are downright un-American. Sure, some of the Ten Commandments overlap wit…