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Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…orical. Thus, the Qur’an promises that in Paradise, there will be gardens, running water, and ripe fruits. The righteous will be clad in silk and recline on couches, ready to be waited on and to receive the attention of houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to the righteous in the Qur’an isn’t…

Why Has the Critique of Hypocrisy Run Out of Steam?

By Christopher Douglas

…e laud them for excellence in pretense. But it wasn’t so good for the real world. All the world might be a stage, and humans merely players, but Jesus’s critique seemed to suggest that some were acting for the purpose of deceiving their fellow actors, or even God himself. The critique of hypocrisy as a rhetorical weapon is indigenous to the Christian tradition, even to the point of being serviceable in the critique of other Christians. A famous Am…

Irish Vote Reflects Diminished Moral Authority of Catholic Church

By Peter Montgomery

…ments against marriage equality have lost their impact in key parts of the world. “We’re losing the marriage battles — that’s the truth, especially in Western Europe,” said Ignacio Arsuaga, a Spanish activist who founded a global online campaign platform called CitizenGo. (Its board includes Brian Brown of the United States’s National Organization for Marriage.) “Our arguments are not reaching the majority of society. The majority of society just…

Why So Many American Christians Don’t Understand Protest

By Leah Pannell

…ruptive. As a Christian, my faith tells me that God understood this and disrupted the world in a human body. Filled with the Spirit, Jesus declared, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” He walked the earth, protesting the powers of death and darkness, disrupting systems as he healed the sick, embraced the poor, and ultimately claimed victory over death and the grave. It’s hard for me to comprehend how so many fellow Christians misunderstand…

5 Lessons From an Ex-Gay Industry Defector

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…d how through a series of events or internal experiences you now see the “truth”. […] I knew the expected pattern from the years I spent in the church prior to my public policy work. I don’t know if others embellished their stories or if they were encouraged to pad them to make them more convincing, either explicitly or implicitly. I do think we have goals when we speak to certain audiences, and fashion our stories to meet those goals, excluding s…

The Religious Lives of Soldiers

By Jonathan Ebel

…military life into our narratives. Second, to turn things around a bit, histories of war and the military are often written as if war were a completely areligious practice. We have occasional stories of exceptionally devout generals (or presidents) and aphorisms about atheists and foxholes, but few historians seem interested in weaving religion into narratives of American war-craft whether as a way of thinking about decisions to enter war and par…

Conservative Christians Get in Touch with Feminist Side in Islamophobia

By Julie Ingersoll

…llection of short stories by Hemingway on gender imbalance he writes, “the stories are haunting, demonstrating the brutality that comes to men without the presence of women—and especially without the companionship of wives.” Right, I forget, in patriarchal fundamentalist Christianity, women do exist to serve men and facilitate men’s exercise of dominion (first their fathers’ and then their husbands’). So the question of what happens to them (men)…

Cleansing Monsters: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

By Joseph Laycock

…of evil, and stories about hunting vampires naturally invoke a Manichaean worldview: a struggle between absolute good and evil. A consequence of Grahame-Smith’s historical fiction is that it utterly vilifies the South, portraying them as enemies of humanity itself. Jefferson Davis, as vampire collaborator, explains, “Mr. Lincoln, vampires are superior to man, just as man is superior to the Negro. It’s the natural order of things, you see.” In the…

Now That ‘Serial’ is Over: 2014’s Best Podcasts about Religion

By Andrew Aghapour

…erwise difficult experiences. RISK! by Kevin Allison asks people to “tell true stories they never thought they’d dare to share in public,” and it has quickly become the podcast of record for deep, dark secrets. “Into the Mystic” is a collection of three stories about mystical experiences and crises of faith. It’s also a great introduction to the power of storytelling. The second runner up, You Made It Weird, is ostensibly a comedy podcast where st…

Beyond Retribution: Bin Laden’s Death in its Cosmic Context

By Eric Reitan

…rospect of dropping our delusions and rationalizations. But sometimes the truth thrusts itself at us in ways we can’t ignore, driving us towards realizations we’d rather flee. Often this is what victim-offender dialogue achieves, bringing offenders face-to-face with the reality of what they’ve done, making it so real they can’t hide from it anymore. And so, as I thought about how I would sentence Timothy McVeigh, I envisioned something analogous t…