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Death With Dignity: Combatting Religious Opposition to Physician-Assisted Suicide

By Krista Kapralos

…have long been supportive of pain-management measures, up to and including high doses of morphine that slow a patient’s respiration to the point of death, said Courtney Campbell, a professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University, and an expert on faith and end-of-life issues. The Catholic position on physician-assisted death contradicts its support of such pain management, known as palliative sedation, he said. “If the religious tradi…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…ribly consequential post of chair of the Committee on Catholic Education. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput beat another Francis pick, Bridgeport, CT, Bishop Frank Caggiano, for chair of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, which is responsible for promoting the church’s teaching regarding hot-button issues like family and contraception (or the lack thereof). Msgr. J. Brian Bransfield was elected as the conference’s new ge…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…hold dearest change how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include ever…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…centuries. As Liz Mundy recalls in her Atlantic article, University of Washington professor Pepper Schwartz and her gay colleague, the late Phillip Blumstein performed groundbreaking research finding that: … gay and lesbian couples were fairer in their dealings with one another than straight couples, both in intent and in practice. The lesbians in the study were almost painfully egalitarian—in some cases putting money in jars and splitting everyt…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…g commentary that profanes the sacrality of children’s fun and games, you think? Historians are not usually the life of the party, but history does shed light in the darkness, and the history of Halloween, as most readers here know, is primarily about collapsing the boundaries between the living and the dead. Most accounts begin with Samhain, a pagan holiday that marked the beginning of winter but also celebrated the migration of the dead to the n…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…1918, in the Indian state of Karnataka. He suffered through an agonizing childhood in which he lost his father and siblings to various illnesses, and was afflicted himself with tuberculosis, typhoid, and malaria. Already decrepit at the age of sixteen, Iyengar went to the Karnataka city of Mysore to study yoga with his brother-in-law, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who was said to have constructed a yoga system meant to strengthen the body through se…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…or derive from formal religious doctrine. After all, no religious text prohibits adherents from providing contraception in a healthcare insurance plan for employees. As such, while Jewish plaintiffs have been at the forefront of challenging abortion restrictions on religious freedom grounds—assuming a significant burden in doing so—a religious right to abortion isn’t limited to those who can point to Jewish law, or halakha, in their claims. As ou…

Mormon Rejection of Trump Embarrassing for Evangelicals?

By Neil J. Young

…hing it can to undercut Trump’s standing among evangelical voters, rally behind his opponents, and celebrate any of his political setbacks. That’s why the near-total silence among anti-Trump evangelicals over his trouncing in Utah yesterday seems so odd. Yet that silence also reveals the complicated evangelical-Mormon partnership. While evangelicals and Mormons have no doubt found themselves allied in many political causes through the years, Ameri…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…lim world, or with governments charged with upholding laws. The upshot of this is, this scandal is going to get much worse before it gets better. Despite the letter to Ireland, in which he bashed the secular world, his meeting with abuse victims here in the United States, and the whining about the press giving him a bad rap, this Pope is toast. Whether he resigns or not, his Papacy legacy is in tatters historically, unless he can pull off an amazi…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…big tent approach to coverage of American ir/a/religion. But do the Gallup numbers point to new ways we might be thinking about business as usual? Two findings are striking. First: Gallup reported that although Americans felt religion’s influence was declining, many—75 percent—agreed that more religion would be positive for the country. Not surprisingly, churchgoers were most gung-ho about religion’s beneficial impact. But “over half of those who…