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

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ectives on economic justice. Still, having spent a few days earlier in the month among a group of religionistas invited to attend SOCAP11, an annual gathering that connects social entrepreneurs with socially-motivated investors, I couldn’t help but wonder, What Would Jesus Do Now?, at a moment in American history when presidential calls for greater tax equity must contend with the dystopian “class warfare” fears of Tea Partiers and other Republica…

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

…opular public face. Robert Ingersoll, a leading figure in the Free Thought movement of the late 19th century, was at one time the most popular speaker on the U.S. speaking circuit. Ingersoll was well known for being a loving family man and an ethical leader in his community—as a public unbeliever. Though he criticized Christianity and religion in general, he did so from a place of sincere engagement with its ideas. And while he was a self-styled a…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…nd Jews joined together in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the fair housing movement, the nuclear freeze movement, and various other demands for peace and justice. In this era, conservative people of faith largely lacked a unified political voice, in part by choice; evangelical Protestants for decades embraced the view that politics is a sinful realm best avoided by people whose primary focus is on eternal salvation. (And…

The Role of Faith in the Lives of Abortion Providers

By Sarah Posner

…rganizing an event, “Contraception Is Not Controversial” in Chicago with Democratic Representatives Mike Quigley and Jan Schakowsky. The doctor said she is worried about the increasing number of restrictions on abortion states are implementing. (To get a sense how women’s access to abortion is shrinking across the country, take a look at this map assembled by the Guttmacher Institute.) Twenty-four hour waiting periods, for example, can cause a wom…

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

By Kelly J. Murphy

…a. (Dan and his brother Ron belonged to a splinter group of fundamentalist Mormons who believed in polygamy, among other things, and Dan continues to identify as the prophet Elijah, who will herald the Second Coming of Jesus.) The Stracks and Dan Lafferty knew each other, but apparently, according to reporters Lafferty did not talk much about the impending end of the world with the Stracks and their contact ended in 2008. Nothing in the Strack’s h…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…ine than the power of workplace democracy and collective bargaining to put more money into the hands of regular people—and also to restore some of the dignity that creation theology says rightly belongs to those who labor honestly. That is why progressive religious leaders need to get behind the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which will come before the new Congress within the next few months. EFCA would strengthen the labor movement, and I shoul…

Union Busting for God: Catholic Colleges Invoke “Religious Freedom” to Violate Catholic Teaching

By Kaya Oakes

…l average of 65 percent, but still problematic for a religious order whose most famous member decries materialist greed on a regular basis. At Jesuit run Seattle University, adjuncts voted to form a union in 2014, but according to the Seattle Times, “ballots were locked up” while the university appealed to the NLRB on religious freedom grounds. According to Seattle University professor Emily Lieb, in April of 2015, “some 20 faculty, students, and…

Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

By Lynne Gerber

…amiliar. I’d be happy if readers came away from the book seeing dieting as more complicated, and more problematic, than they had previously thought and efforts at sexual reorientation more akin to popular self-help culture than they would assume. If evangelical readers found Christian practices somewhat strange and non-Christian readers found them oddly familiar, that would be great too. Is there a book you wish you had written? The book that was…

The Anti-Trans Hate Machine’s Conspiracies Don’t Stop at the US Border

By Annika Brockschmidt

…centrist and even some leftist circles, often leading those using them to more and more extreme positions. This rhetoric has consequences. The British attorney general Suella Braverman, for instance, recently claimed that schools have no legal obligation to affirm trans pupils—to address them using their pronouns or their chosen name. But while the UK is at the forefront of Europe’s anti-trans bigotry—with even some leftist or liberal news outlet…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…relationship. Academic Quality A surprising number of courses asked little more of students than to memorize Bible verses or learn basic details of biblical stories so that they could fill in the blanks on tests. Some made very questionable choices about the use of classroom time, such as the course that spent two days watching “the historic documentary Ancient Aliens,” which presents “a new interpretation of angelic beings described as extraterre…