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“Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?”: Rock and Religion, Irish-Style

By Lisa Bitel

…She feels examined by their eyes Is she right or is she wrong? She’s got a number in her pocket And one change of clothes Her innocence is fading Like last years winter snow’s Light a candle in the window So she can see it from the road With all the loving in your heart Welcome her back home. The Docs’ keening for a fallen innocent seems all too prescient, given the recent negotiations over revelations of priestly sexual abuse of both girls and bo…

“Real” Evangelicals Don’t Support Trump? Not So Fast…

By Neil J. Young

…e larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trump evangelicals’ main argument about the suspect…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…borhoods, sometimes experiencing significant attrition in their membership numbers and finances, and sometimes choosing to relocate altogether. Even institutionally resourceful congregations that remain in high-poverty neighborhoods have increasingly faced great difficulties in their efforts to connect culturally, interpersonally, and programmatically to their immediate neighborhoods. In a 2003 study of interactions between churches and impoverish…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…ges for the Kingdom. Reconciliation is a funny thing that takes shape in a number of forms within opposing communities. But one thing I know is true: it does not start or end with victory in mind. Reconciliation is best lived when Kingdom, on Earth as it is in Heaven, is the main goal of faithful establishment. I would remind Mr. Perkins to remember a few of Jesus’ direct words. First, in Matthew 22:18-22, Jesus reiterates to the religious gatekee…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…a long and savage struggle against the world’s most powerful empire at the time. If the United States can be said to have an actual birthday, that date should be June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution—the number specified in order for the Constitution to be in full and binding effect for all 13 former colonies. Those who prefer a winter birthday might want to go for Dec. 15, 1791, the date on which the…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…of trends, 40% of Catholics supported same-sex marriage in 2001 with that number increasing to nearly 60% by 2014. By contrast, only 13% of Evangelicals favored same-sex marriage in 2001 and just 23% approve of it today. Writing in The Atlantic, PRRI’s Robert Jones gets at the truth behind these numbers: “there is more support for official Roman Catholic Church positions among white evangelical Protestants than among Catholics.” But, as he notes,…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…se texts continue to live on all around us, whether we know it or not. Sometimes these afterlives are beautiful and inspiring; sometimes these afterlives are awful, created out of fear and some two thousand years of failing (often) to ask the right questions about the text(s) we are reading. I came to teaching zombies late in the game in the spring of 2014, when zombie courses had long been on the books at a number of institutions across the Unite…

Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…to be tested by the Tea Party’s mobilization, voter apathy, and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war vete…

Conservative Republican Muslim Condemns Fox Report on Congressional Staffers as “Anti-Muslim Bigotry”

By Sarah Posner

…approached then-Speaker Newt Gingrich about obtaining a room for the small number of Muslim staffers to hold Friday prayers. Gingrinch granted that request, and the tradition continued through the tenures of Speakers Dennis Hastert, also a Republican, and Nancy Pelosi. Over the years, the number of people attending grew, eventually leading to the creation of the CMSA around 2007, when Khan has already left Hill service and was working in the Bush…