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Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course no one denies that Francis is a change for the better. As Jon O’Brien, head of Catholics for Choice, told The Guardian, Francis isn’t so much “a breath of fresh air as someone who has gone into the Vatican with an oxygen tank strapped to his back. He’s got the church out of a very difficult spo…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…d film 8: The Mormon Proposition has left the film festival circuit and is available through on-demand cable—with some rumors of technical difficulties in the Salt Lake / Provo areas—reaction is filtering back from Mormon viewers of the film. LDS Church spokespeople have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [Se…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…nd. An interview with Siviku Hutchinson on the racial politics of atheism, a book review of The Bonobo and the Atheist, and Elizabeth Drescher’s ongoing coverage of nones underline the big tent approach to coverage of American ir/a/religion. But do the Gallup numbers point to new ways we might be thinking about business as usual? Two findings are striking. First: Gallup reported that although Americans felt religion’s influence was declining, many…

What Do ‘The Christians’ Believe? Easter Reflections from a Non-Christian

By Gary Laderman

…be stockpiling guns, teaching people how to use explosives, planning a war against the government, and initiating a final battle with the Antichrist. It appears they planned to kill local police officers with hopes this would bring others to the violent religious war. What do the Christians believe? We are witnessing what could be one of the most destructive scandals ever in the Catholic Church. A flurry of reports and allegations have been in the…

An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

By Anne Eggebroten

…o ring hollow. “Call no man father,” warned Jesus in a passionate diatribe against “those who love the place of honor” and like to be called rabbi or teacher (Matthew 23). “Woe to you!” he repeated, describing the leaders of his day as whitewashed on the outside but inside full of “all kinds of filth.” In fact, deference to “Father” is at the heart of this mess. Nuns now report not challenging priests when they spent unusual time alone with childr…

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…

Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

By Mark Hulsether

…to a tragic hurricane in Haiti, which he called a punishment from God for Satanism—the same episode that Chrissy Stroop ranked as number one on her own top 10 list, and a worthy contender, no doubt! But since Robertson liked to say outrageous things like this on a regular basis, I created a list more attuned to underlying structural aspects of his resume: less about preposterous provocations and more about his work as a cog in the everyday banalit…

Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army

By Peter Montgomery

…as entertainer and “educator” has been his intense attacks on President Obama’s theology of salvation, which he has called “evil” and “satanic.” The nature of salvation is not typically the topic of choice for political pundits. But Beck has latched onto it with a fury because he insists that President Obama’s liberation theology-influenced view of salvation is not only unchristian but un-American. Beck has become utterly enamored of religious ri…

Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

By Paula M. Cooey

…the idea of challenging traditional conceptions of God is particularly unbearable in the face of suffering. This is psychologically understandable. That there might be no God, that God is ultimately indifferent to human suffering, that God is less than all powerful, that the events themselves challenge all attempts to find meaning—such possibilities are less likely to be entertained, because the very idea of meaninglessness, on the face of it, an…