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The Oil Spill and “Real Deathliness”

By Daniel Schultz

…can’t even grasp, and nobody—nobody—has any plausible idea of how to break free from the system. There are plenty of ideas floating around, yes, but there are no easy answers to put into practice today. If there were, we’d be using them. That’s what we’re afraid of and what we can’t afford to admit even to ourselves. So to my mind, this “Targum on Romans” does more to speak to the situation than all the pretty talk about “creation care”: So here’s…

Police in Ferguson Keep Praying and Preying

By Anthea Butler

…r police actions and violence towards citizen protestors is detestable. America has a history of those in authority invoking Christianity to justify slavery, lynching, and bombings. During the conflict in Ferguson, the local and state police who recite nightly prayers before going out to intimidate and arrest protestors follow this historical trajectory. Perhaps the most galling figure is Captain Johnson, appointed by Gov. Jay Nixon to oversee the…

Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue

By Cody J. Sanders

…le respond to this appeal, saying, “Things are a lot better for gay people today than they were several years (or decades) ago. In time, our society (or churches) will come around on this issue.” To these friends and others, I must say, “It’s time.” For Lucas, Brown, Clementi, Walsh, and Chase the time is up. For these teens and the myriad other bisexual, transgender, lesbian and gay youth lost to suicide, the waiting game hasn’t worked so well. A…

Politicized Religion Fuels Christian-Muslim Violence In Nigeria

By Elizabeth Dickinson

…ither away without lawyer or trial or light of day. A rich man can buy his freedom, though he’d likely never be arrested in the first place. He can shame the (usually poor) policemen into admitting that their guns have no bullets and their threats have no depth compared with his pockets. When a poor man steals bread, he is taken to the run-down concrete police station, stripped of his clothes, and marched through the street in shame for his guilt….

The Myth of ‘Voodoo’: A Caribbean American Response to Representations of Haiti

By Dianne M. Stewart

…ul over human history is reconciled effortlessly with the jarringly asymmetrical social and historical arrangements like the transatlantic slave trade and ensuing slave economies in the Caribbean and the Americas. If racial slavery of this sort was an expression of “God’s” good nature, then how should we understand the devil’s nature in this theological schema? Robertson would say that Haiti’s centuries-long struggle for freedom, sovereignty, and…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…even a vague sense of danger during this research. There is a trope in American horror of the dedicated researcher who uncovers too much. The power of this trope played out in 1996, when a reporter in New York vanished while doing a story on the vampire community. As I describe in the book, she was almost certainly killed by the Russian mafia. There is a certain romance in imagining that she was taken by vampires, but it is irresponsible to promo…

The Tragedy of Religious Freedom

By Patrick Hornbeck

…e claim of the Southern restauranteur who in the 1960s denied service to African Americans on the ground that his religion mandated the separation of the races. (A unanimous Supreme Court called the restauranteur’s defense “patently frivolous.”) Today, there is a similar but not identical logic in some of the controversies on which I have previously reported, especially those of the baker who wouldn’t create a custom cake for a gay wedding and the…

A Writer’s Murder Raises Fears of Death-by-Decree

By Shalom Goldman

…ions are better than in Saudi Arabia.” He points to the status of women in today’s Iran. More than 60% of university students are women. And, unlike in Saudi Arabia, women in Iran drive. Kadivar delights in telling me that in the holy city of Qom, there are women cab drivers who specialize in taking families on excursions. But most of our conversation was about the murder of Rafiq Tagi. In an open letter to Ayatollah Lankarani, son of the author o…

A Catholic’s Eulogy for the Harvard “Black Mass” Controversy

By Craig A. Ford Jr.

…in History, argues that, when we apply the most rigorous standard of historical scholarship to allegations of Satanic evil conspiracies and rituals like that of the “black mass,” we find that “no evidence has ever been found to verify the atrocities as historical events” (212). Moreover, Frankfurter writes that when we critically examine perceptions of these “evil rites” in our modern day, we find that they’re the products of an age-old attributi…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…t to them personally still say it would be positive for society if more Americans were religious.” What planet do these Americans live on? Here in the U.S., religious fervor is at the center of a 30-year culture war that has debased civic discourse and rendered our nation ungovernable. Worldwide, religious sentiments have been mobilized to torture and murder. I understand that religion itself is not to blame; followers can distort religious teachi…