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The Question is: What Kind of Football Does God Fancy?

By Jeffrey Scholes

…the rest of us), all of the Packers effort for 90% of the game was in the service of an 11th hour drama—just as the holy screenwriter drew it up. Two days after the NFC Championship, Rodgers countered Wilson’s theology by quipping, “I don’t think God cares a whole lot about the outcome. He cares about the people involved, but I don’t think he’s a big football fan.” We can read this rejoinder as a classic minimization of the opposing teams’ skill…

Sterilization Denial for Woman with Brain Tumor Highlights Religious Liberty Conflict

By Patricia Miller

…rom discriminating on the basis of sex: “When providers seek out a medical service specially affecting women’s reproductive capacity for exclusion, they target pregnant women or women of childbearing age for unequal treatment.” She says Section 1557 should be “viewed as a federal counterweight to conscience protections, requiring us to reassess the balance between sex equality and religious liberty.” In addition to challenging Church Amendment pro…

Kim Davis, County Clerk, is Not a Person

By Ivan Strenski

…,” the use for which you have to pay what he demands on top of the cost of service. Tony’s “businesses” are very personal things, part of himself. And, thinking this way about public offices is precisely what defines “corruption” means. Flip the coin, and just as Kim Davis does not own the County clerkship, despite her mother having served in it before her, Kim’s private property, say, her body, does not belong to the state. The temptation is grea…

Irish Vote Reflects Diminished Moral Authority of Catholic Church

By Peter Montgomery

Irish voters turned out in huge numbers on Friday and cast their votes 62 to 38 percent in favor of amending the country’s constitution to allow same-sex couples to marry, making the overwhelmingly Catholic country the first in the world to legalize marriage for same-sex couples through a national referendum. Trevor Gundy, writing for the Religion News Service just before the vote, had examined the decline of the Church’s power in Ireland. “Many…

Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…echnology, and culture, the report offers two insights–one about religious services, and one about the difficulties of studying etiquette through surveys. It’s “Generally Not OK,” But… One part of the Pew study asked respondents to gauge the appropriateness of using cellphones in various places, including whether it is “generally okay or not okay for people to use their cellphones…at church or [a] worship service.” A full 96% of those surveyed cho…

Kentucky Court Clerk, A “Professing Apostolic Christian,” Questions Legal Authority

By Sarah Posner

…urt papers as “a professing Apostolic Christian who attends church worship service multiple times per week, attends weekly Bible study, and leads a weekly Bible study with women at a local jail.” That might leave a lot of people scratching their heads, as this description is not as recognizable as “Presbyterian” or “Baptist” or “evangelical.” So what does that mean? I asked our own (very busy covering the Pope) Anthea Butler, a religious historian…

A Nazi, a Jewish Prisoner, and a “Magic” Bible, Or, Christian Romance Fiction Gone Very, Very Wrong

By Julia Seymour

…he gripped my hand in the doorway of the church, following the Good Friday service, “I’ve never really liked Jews.” I had just finished a sermon in which I decried present-day harassment of Jews in the Ukraine and noted that we are kidding ourselves if we thought we would treat Jesus better now than he was treated then. We prayed. We grieved. I again felt the chasm between Christianity, the religion of my heart, and Judaism, the religion of my blo…

Millennials Put Off By Rigid, Judgmental Religion Offered … More Orthodoxy

By Daniel Schultz

…y helping anyone in need. You’ll notice that Shrum never says a word about service or ministry. It’s all holiness all the time. Unfortunately for churches like Shrum’s, holiness just isn’t very popular in our culture these days. What people want in spirituality is egalitarianism, an emphasis on the ways in which God welcomes, rather than rejects. It’s okay that Shrum or other conservative pastors might say “Sorry, we can’t offer that in our church…

My Congregation Tried to Help a Syrian Family Settle in the US

By Thomas Warming

…’t need protection, thank you very much. Something has shaken loose in the American psyche this week, a vein of paranoid xenophobia that for a long while has been inflated with poison by people eager to take advantage of the cultural and economic anxieties of the nation. The rottenness has finally burst for everyone to see and those responsible for pumping it up are scrambling to take advantage. All I want to do is be free to live my faith as best…

Strangest Hot Take of the Day: Why Evangelicals Like Trump

By Sarah Posner

…ti-immigrant diatribe, but at his weak stances on their key issues. In the service of explaining what there is of an evangelical attraction to Trump (and, as I wrote earlier this week, it is there, although by no means a majority), Brody portrays Trump as a no-holds-barred honest broker and, therefore, victim of the media. That’s why, he says, evangelicals can relate. “Donald Trump operates in a world of absolutes,” Brody writes. “A world of right…