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Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…m race divided the 2004 electorate: voters who frequently attended worship services were far more likely to support Bush, while Sen. John Kerry enjoyed a preponderance of support from people who rarely or never worship. (The problem for Kerry was that the United States is a highly churchgoing nation.) The 2006 midterm Elections featured several successful new Democratic candidates, including Ted Strickland (who won the Ohio gubernatorial race) and…

Risky Business: The Pitfalls at the Corner of Church & Wall Street

By Elizabeth Drescher

…too many (no matter how ethical the vetting of my investments) without dramatic structural and regulatory change. The question for religious leaders, it seems to me, is how best to stand at the socially and spiritually productive intersection of market and spiritual economies so what appear to be two powerful forces for good might themselves stand together for real, sustained economic change….

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…mmunity that I can lead them to more familiarity with a very great text. A number of times you bring up Thomas Jefferson’s abridgement of the Gospels. He seems to be someone who, in some ways, you’re identifying with but also making very different choices from. I don’t have the luxury of just snipping out the parts of the Bible I don’t like. Whereas I greatly admire Jefferson and the Enlightenment figures for their courage in blasting through so m…

Debunking the Myth That Democracy Is “Incompatible” With Islam

By Asma Afsaruddin

…otion that belongs to the Graeco-Christian tradition alone. After September 11, these views have gained more currency in influential circles as prophetic auguries of the inevitable clash between a democratic modern West and an incorrigibly “medieval” and illiberal Islamic world. Contemporary Issues in Islam Asma Afsaruddin Edinburgh University Press September 1, 2015 This entrenched view has been challenged by nuanced and theoretically more sophis…

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…DP signed the LGBTI Rights Agreement upon being elected. After the November 1st repeat of the general election, 16 of these candidates were elected once again. European Union: LGBT Rights in progress reports for nations seeking EU membership On Thursday, the European Commission published its annual progress reports on seven countries’ progress toward EU membership: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey….

Will the Pope’s Woman Problem Alienate Young Catholics?

By Patricia Miller

…less essential to the functioning of the church. She noted that many of the 19 percent of Vatican employees who are women are in service jobs, and that there are only two women undersecretaries. In addition, Francis recently said he had no plans to appoint women to head dicasteries, which are the governing bodies of the Vatican (although four women were appointed to the commission on sex abuse that Francis created). “What governs all of this are t…

Coffeehouse Churches and the ‘Party-on Messiah’: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 3

By Mark Dery

…med Middle America that: Jesus is alive and well and living in the radical spiritual fervor of a growing number of young Americans who have proclaimed an extraordinary religious revolution in his name. […] Christian coffeehouses have opened in many cities, signaling their faith even in their names: The Way Word in Greenwich Village, the Catacombs in Seattle, I Am in Spokane. […] ‘It’s like a glacier,’ says ‘Jesus-Rock’ Singer Larry Norman, 24. ‘It…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…

The Religious Case Against Religious Discrimination in Cakeshop Case

By Patrick Hornbeck

…like Phillips’s. But, as survey after survey has demonstrated, substantial numbers of Catholics, and to a lesser extent evangelicals as well, are not following their denominations’ leaders down this particular road, and there is a growing number of religious institutions that have embraced marriage equality and advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in the public square. Cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop make it clear that the boundaries of a national settleme…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…Jonestown is the one emblazoned in our cultural consciousness. On November 18, 1978, the largest number of American civilian lives was lost due to a single non-natural disaster—a sad distinction Jonestown would hold until September 11, 2001. In Stories from Jonestown, the most recent addition to the Jonestown library, Leigh Fondakowski has compiled the numerous interviews that she conducted in order to write her play, The People’s Temple, which…