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From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

By Daniel Schultz

…ciety, among the most physically intimate, and likely include the greatest number of vulnerable people. Even single members of large congregations can have a dramatic effect on how coronavirus spreads or doesn’t, as South Korea found out the hard way. While many aren’t meeting at all or are streaming services, some churches that do meet feel like they need to support those who need it, in worship or otherwise. My mother’s congregation in Madison,…

There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

By Haroon Moghul

…e latest in a series of provocative, offensive, and frankly fratboyish Facebook posts coming from Israel’s embassy in Ireland. They go from digs at Ireland (“naïve”) for joining Europe and much of the world in voting for an upgrade in Palestine’s status at the United Nations, to the most recent—an allegation that, if Jesus were alive today, he would probably be lynched by hostile Palestinians. Nobody at the embassy seems to know who’s writing and…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…wo piles. The first, what we might call “neurotheologies,” is comprised of books and articles that attempt to objectify and validate religious experiences with data about the brain. These studies were especially common in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when medical researchers and scholars of religion started training neural imaging technologies on the brains of meditators, shamans, and mystics with the hope of isolating neural circuitry that was…

Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

By Brock Bahler

…w, while 55% of Americans as a whole have a favorable view of Israel, that number jumps to 80% among White evangelicals. And further, among evangelicals who support Israel, up to 50% have suggested End Times prophecies are part of their motivation. There are surely some whose uncritical support of Israel is motivated by End Times prophecies, though there’s significant disagreement on that point. What I would argue instead is that Christian Zionist…

Conservative Christians Insist the Toxic Theology Portrayed in the Duggar Family Doc is ‘Fringe’ — But is it Really All That Different?

By Caroline Matas

…hooling movement in the 1980s and the brother of Joshua Harris, whose 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye made waves in American evangelical purity culture. Alex Harris—a lawyer who has clerked for both Justice Anthony Kennedy and then-Judge Neil Gorsuch—tweeted that he participated in the docuseries to tell the story of his own family’s involvement in the movement to “take America back for God” and to explain how his own religious views have shifte…

“One of Us”: Rick Santorum and the Politics of (Very Big) Family

By Kathryn Joyce

…now that they need to have more children, because their death rates are outnumbering their births rates, and they’re in crisis,” Michelle Duggar told Christian news network CBN last week. “My Body is Not My Own” It’s not only on the campaign trail that the Quiverfull playbook is enjoying a wider audience. Amid all the discussion in recent months about the new fight over contraception—a development that seemed to take much of the mainstream media…

Obstacles for Secularists

By Sarah Posner

…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…

A Queer Atheist In the Heart of Mormon Country

By Chris Stedman

…But as was evident at this year’s Utah Pride, there is also a fast-growing number of Mormons who are working for change. They may be less visible—after all, our society, and the media in particular, privilege polarizing perspectives—but these Mormons are there, doing difficult but important work. Among them is Joanna Brooks, who served as the Mormon panelist at the conference. She has been an advocate for LGBTQ equality and acceptance among Mormon…

The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

By Ismar Volić

…e they are, those same parties. They continue to profit from the tired playbook of dialing up fear and nationalism during each election cycle, stoking grievances from the past, and skillfully turning artificial ethnic segregation into streams of money that fill their coffers. Bosnia is a country with no prospects, its only claim to fame the incessant flood of its fleeing youth, who barely glance in the rearview mirror as they search for a better l…

Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

By Katherine Stewart

…may be the one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” The right to the free exerci…