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2010: A Banner Year for Biblical Patriarchy

By Julie Ingersoll

…Baby Conference. At the conference they honored Michelle Duggar, mother of 19 children as an example who “has encouraged many women to embrace the blessing of children and rejoice in the high calling of motherhood.” Finally, while 2010 saw developments in the Creationist Movement, it also sought to frame environmentalism as an anti-Christian Pantheisic religion that threatens human life across the planet and launched the Mysterious Islands Campai…

“Dark” Skin No Longer a Curse in Online Book of Mormon

By Joanna Brooks

…Mormon did not feature summary chapter headings. Headings were added in the 1920s and revised in the 1980s by Bruce R. McConkie, author of Mormon Doctrine (now out of print), a compendium of Mormon theology controversial both for its explicit anti-Catholicism and its promulgation of adoctrinal racist folklore, as we covered here at RD. In 1981, the Church changed the language of 2 Nephi 30: 6 to remove the statement that Lamanites who repented wou…

Equally Blessed: Wear a Rainbow Ribbon to Mass

By Alex McNeill

…h is being manifested, they are going to miss the boat. I believe the Holy Spirit is speaking among the lay people of the church and the Bishops who are not discerning that call, and are not listening to that voice, to their detriment. I think the illogical statements that bishops make about LGBT people and issues cause Catholic people to question bishops’ moral authority, not only on that issue but on other issues as well. We saw with birth contr…

High Schooler says Barbara Ehrenreich’s Book Violates his Civil Rights

By Sarah Posner

…roup in recognition of books “which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” In the section at issue, I observed that the social teachings of Jesus went utterly unmentioned at the tent revival I attended. The revival preachers clearly preferred the dead and risen Christ to the living Jesus — who did indeed drink wine and could even make it out of water. As for the vagrancy charge: that’s what he was, a homeless, itinerant preacher. Ehrenrei…

Wojnarowicz’s Ant-Covered Jesus: Blasphemy or Religious Art?

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…Diamanda Galás (“This is the Law of the Plague” with lyrics from Leviticus 15). The 13-minute version that Wojnarowicz edited is silent. Much of the imagery comes from Wojnarowicz’s time in Mexico in the 1980s, and shot on Super-8 film. Mexican Day of the Dead ceremonies mix with Aztec statues; scenes of professional wrestling merge with cockfights and bullfights; strong crucifixion imagery merges with street scenes from Mexican cities and towns;…

Homeschooling and American Exceptionalism

By Julie Ingersoll

…ing whatsoever is to be added to this, whether by “new revelations” of the Spirit or by the traditions of man.” [emphasis in the original] Certainly homeschoolers are not monolithic; in fact the earliest years of the movement were dominated by lefties who rejected public education for its stifling regimentation, favoring what they often referred to as unschooling. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century homeschooling has become an industr…

Should Faith Healing ‘Do Business’ with Modern Medicine?

By Beatrice Marovich

…effect? It was with this ideas in mind that numerous studies throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s sought to determine whether religious practices such as prayer were healing forces whose efficacy could be verified through clinical trials and modern science. But, in 2006, the largest and most ambitious prayer study to date (led by the cardiologist Herbert Benson) indicated that patients who were prayed for (and were told about it, giving th…

Mao, Meet Confucius: China’s Religious Revolution

By Kwok Pui-lan

…e, many Westerners marvel at the rate of growth of Chinese Christianity. In 1949 there were about 700,000 Chinese Protestants; today the number is estimated to be 50-80 million, if one includes members of house churches. Adding 8-12 million Catholics, China will soon become home to the largest Christian population on the globe. How did this Religious Renaissance Come About? Many new Buddhist temples have been built in recent years. Devout Chinese…

Note to Religious Liberals: God Does Take Sides

By Daniel Schultz

…ack into serfdom, unemployment benefits expired, and in a bid to bring the spirit of peace and generosity back to Christmas, Republicans threatened to filibuster the START treaty until tax cuts for the upper 2% of wealthy Americans were made permanent. Oh, and like a maraschino cherry high atop a lollapalooza of suck, we find out from Wikileaks that the Obama administration—with GOP help—basically has quashed the investigation into torture by slow…

Think Yoga is a Religion? Try Youth Soccer!

By Joanna Brooks

…uth who face broad misunderstanding of their religion. That’s certainly a fair enough request. But at the core of the Take Back Yoga treatise is an unarticulated problem: how does a culture respond when it finds that its ancient religious rituals have been totally decontextualized from their original settings and recontextualized in American popular culture? It’s a problem familiar to Native Americans, whose religious lexicon—not to mention land b…