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New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ouse, and his colleague, Rob Tisinai, gives a better breakdown of what the numbers really mean—and it isn’t a rousing success story about “change.” “Out of 98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexual feelings or become a bit more bi. And possibly none who turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do n…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…ion or function of the brain, it must not be real. The article points to a number of ways neuropsychology has been overinterpreted and oversold. Rosenbaum addresses the fetishizing of fMRI images, the ideology that conflates causation and correlation, and the shifting semantics — evil recast as “non-empathy” by one esteemed psychologist (echoing, interestingly, the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation). But it’s the image of…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…mon experience suggests that the dominant usage of the term “Christian” in American discourse is not as a descriptor of the way an individual regards Jesus Christ, but as a political and social term used to distinguish sanctioned branches of Christianity and withhold approval from others, often in the service of institutional and political agendas. But none of this political and institutional debate changes the immense role Jesus Christ plays in t…

New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

By Chrissy Stroop

…arly encouraging, but there are a few exceptions. For example, only 34% of Americans believe that it is never appropriate to teach in public schools that some Americans are transgender. This and similar figures regarding feelings about same-sex relationships—for which there is very little difference between those who are parents and those who aren’t—could be useful for fighting against the well-organized efforts of minority control over school lib…

Mormon Women Knock at the Door, Are Turned Away

By Holly Welker

…ust be made to enforce it. In the April 2007 priesthood session, a musical number was provided by a men’s chorus. The chorus was selected and trained by Brigham Young University professor Rosalind Hall, who also chose the music for the choir—but Hall was not allowed to attend the performance; instead, she was replaced by a male colleague, Ronald Staheli, for that one event. In fact, Hall was not even allowed to be in the conference hall to hear he…

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

By Caroline Matas

…er 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 shifted over time. In a review of the docuseries…

New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

By Nicole Greenfield

…Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret. If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which ended up resulting…

Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

By Marian Ronan

…mpanies now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at least, are related to the use of pesticides. It seems that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is already aware of—and opposed t…

Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

By Katherine Stewart

…line of thought informs the world of government-funded, faith-based social services. There is no difference between a secular nonprofit drug rehabilitation service and a faith-based one, right? Except that, as per the Hosanna-Tabor ruling, the religious one now has the right to discriminate against its own employees. So which is it? Is religion something special? Or is it like every other activity? So far as America’s founders were concerned, reli…

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

By Ismar Volić

…isit into the fun and valuable experience of spending my senior year in an American high school, wait things out a little. I hated the idea. All I wanted to do was go back to my band and my friends. But deep down, I understood that staying was the sensible thing to do. So I stayed. In April 1992, as I was getting ready to graduate from high school, the war reached Bosnia after a referendum on its independence. Serbia’s barbaric aggression, of a ma…