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Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

…and now makes her home in Minneapolis, where she’s one of a handful of fulltime staffers with Soulforce Q, the young-adult division of Soulforce. “There is a sort of redemptive suffering in standing here,” she says as a brisk autumn wind reddens her cheeks. “A lot of times students at the places we go aren’t able to be out as gay, so that’s the idea of these vigil lines—to be out and seen.” The riders always alert administrators that they plan to…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…nt where the inmates would talk to me and let me do interviews. There were times when I made phone calls to inmates’ family members to let then know that visiting times had changed, to save them a long trip to the prison. I also visited the families of inmates with pastors and other volunteers to bring food, sometimes a gift a child’s dad had made. I basically become part of the lives of the people whose lives I wanted to document. How did a proje…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…nal interest to him, but the pieces about religion would simply occur from time to time, at Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter. The rest of the polls were about political topics, including the Depression, what was going on in Washington, and so forth. There really wasn’t much interest [in religion] at the time, even though Gallup tried to make the poll results seem interesting, and the newspapers were carrying them. Even in the 1940s when he start…

What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…about. Those arguments led to the emergence of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” in time. And it took a very long time to figure out which was which (and still does). In the debate on the eve of the Iowa straw poll, every single candidate may have raised a hand in objection to John Boehner’s deal that permitted the raising of the US debt ceiling, but here once again their reasons for doing so presumably varied widely. Some may have objected that it went to…

Hajj Journal: M & M

By Amina Wadud

…ide and out, upstairs and into the basement, it was time for hajj. By this time the number of persons who had flooded the city was astronomical. The roommate and I often opted for joining prayer lines out on the street, rather than to fight with the crowds for the Haram mosque at this point. That is, unless we planned ahead by at least an hour. They said the Saudi government had allowed five million this year. I don’t know where the information co…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…th Park episode about Joseph Smith (who also shows up as one of the “Super Best Friends” in other episodes satirizing religion). If attention is flattery, the LDS Church should be pleased. Although the Church can claim only 14 million members (an exaggerated statistic that counts all baptisms and births, but not the actual number of churchgoers), representatives of the religion—and representations of it—have managed to become fixtures in popular c…

Our Lady of Good Hope and Excellent Behavior: Why this Apparition and Why Now?

By Lisa Bitel

…been largely the same each time: Repent, pray the rosary, seek peace. Sometimes she bestowed secrets upon her chosen visionaries, as at Fátima. In the first half of the twentieth century, she warned against Communism. Since the fall of the Wall, her bulletins have focused on the integrity of the nuclear family, the dangers of divorce and abortion, and the evils of consumerism. After World War II, the Virgin went global. Since 1945, at least 700 a…

The Right Questions Kamala Harris’ Blackness — Yet as Long as She Holds Any Power She’ll Always Be Too Black for Them

By Mary Rambaran-Olm

…eritage I think I got this one. At times we’re the P**i racial slur. Other times we’re the N-word. Sometimes we’re neither Black enough nor Brown enough at all. (Some predatory grifting gurus seem to think we’re all actually melatonin rich, but who can afford to sleep in this economy?) If we step aside to let our more melaninated cousins speak, we’re accused of being ashamed of our heritage. If we’re too loud about Black pride, we’re taking the li…

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…say that Taylor and Brooks are not wrong about this particular change over time—more and more people have convinced themselves that they have a choice to make when it comes to God. They feel the need to have a stable of answers when they are called upon to state their religious preference; when they feel compelled to offer an opinion about this scandal or that hypocrisy in which religion is at stake; when they ruminate over whether they should lab…

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…llars every month, though the group has lost its tax-exempt status several times. • A cursory search of property records show James and Betty Robison live in a “modest” Texas home appraised by Tarrant County tax-assessors at $742,800. They also own one or more multi-million-dollar homes in Silverthorne, Colo., and have access to their large Robison ministry ranch and lodge in East Texas built with donor money. As I wrote last year, despite Trinity…