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Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…echnology, and culture, the report offers two insights–one about religious services, and one about the difficulties of studying etiquette through surveys. It’s “Generally Not OK,” But… One part of the Pew study asked respondents to gauge the appropriateness of using cellphones in various places, including whether it is “generally okay or not okay for people to use their cellphones…at church or [a] worship service.” A full 96% of those surveyed cho…

Kentucky Court Clerk, A “Professing Apostolic Christian,” Questions Legal Authority

By Sarah Posner

…urt papers as “a professing Apostolic Christian who attends church worship service multiple times per week, attends weekly Bible study, and leads a weekly Bible study with women at a local jail.” That might leave a lot of people scratching their heads, as this description is not as recognizable as “Presbyterian” or “Baptist” or “evangelical.” So what does that mean? I asked our own (very busy covering the Pope) Anthea Butler, a religious historian…

A Nazi, a Jewish Prisoner, and a “Magic” Bible, Or, Christian Romance Fiction Gone Very, Very Wrong

By Julia Seymour

…he gripped my hand in the doorway of the church, following the Good Friday service, “I’ve never really liked Jews.” I had just finished a sermon in which I decried present-day harassment of Jews in the Ukraine and noted that we are kidding ourselves if we thought we would treat Jesus better now than he was treated then. We prayed. We grieved. I again felt the chasm between Christianity, the religion of my heart, and Judaism, the religion of my blo…

Millennials Put Off By Rigid, Judgmental Religion Offered … More Orthodoxy

By Daniel Schultz

…y helping anyone in need. You’ll notice that Shrum never says a word about service or ministry. It’s all holiness all the time. Unfortunately for churches like Shrum’s, holiness just isn’t very popular in our culture these days. What people want in spirituality is egalitarianism, an emphasis on the ways in which God welcomes, rather than rejects. It’s okay that Shrum or other conservative pastors might say “Sorry, we can’t offer that in our church…

The Martyrdom of Cecil the Lion

By Jacob J. Erickson

…f epic spiritual and natural struggle, and human conquest. A distinctively American form of Big Game hunting can be traced as well. Famously, Teddy Roosevelt headed to East Africa in the name of science (and Western Masculinity, I would add) to bag the Big Five for himself. The term morphed into use for the tourist industry, safari-goers paying big bucks for guides to track down the five. Such activities, for sport, usually served to demonstrate t…

Strangest Hot Take of the Day: Why Evangelicals Like Trump

By Sarah Posner

…ti-immigrant diatribe, but at his weak stances on their key issues. In the service of explaining what there is of an evangelical attraction to Trump (and, as I wrote earlier this week, it is there, although by no means a majority), Brody portrays Trump as a no-holds-barred honest broker and, therefore, victim of the media. That’s why, he says, evangelicals can relate. “Donald Trump operates in a world of absolutes,” Brody writes. “A world of right…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…tive interpretation. Multiply ambiguous, it is a strange concoction of any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply what the Chicag…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…e story ignored the freighted history of sexual reorientation practices in American life. The debates over this practice emerged in the early 1970s, a time when ineffective and dangerous psychiatric interventions into homosexuality were standard mental health practice and harmed many gay people. Having homosexuality declassified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association and other mental health groups was a major victory for GLBT…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…ebate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews material given to him by Spiegel and her editor Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article…

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…69% this year from 72% in 2010. In comparison, Pew estimates 94% of Latin Americans identified themselves as Catholics in 1950. The decline comes despite the 2013 selection of Argentine-born Pope Francis , who has proved enormously popular with Catholics world-wide. Many had hoped a Latin American leader atop the church would stem the slide in the region, which is still home to more than 425 million Catholics. “Catholics love Pope Francis,” said…