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Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…n 1980.” Moreover, as noted in a report by ProPublica, there are a growing number of schools whose white population is 1 percent or less (mostly in the Northeast and Midwest), and roughly 12 percent of black students in the South attend such schools. The tragic plight of impoverished and immobile New Orleanians forced to ride out Katrina in 2005 also serves as a poignant metaphor of what has been a much larger problem of urban poor populations acr…

The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…, represented was the triumph of a new kind of mathematical science, where numbers and computation were esteemed in a whole new way. Copernicus, be sure to recall, did not yet have access to the telescope, so he was basing a number of his computations on things he could not see. In this brave new world, then, the scientists were also casting their “faith in things not seen.” It’s just that what they “saw” was perceived to run counter to the Roman…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…le from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popu…

‘My Name is Legion’: Sources and Forces of White Supremacy in the U.S.

By R. Drew Smith

…hate group and white supremacist group content has skyrocketed—even as the numbers of those groups have themselves noticeably increased. For example, the number of known hate groups is reported to have increased from roughly 600 in the year 2000 to 930 in 2014. Moreover, major television networks such as Fox TV have ushered hate content and white supremacist content into the media mainstream, featuring racialized rhetoric that ranges from disparag…

Even After an Obama Victory Reports of the Death of the Religious Right are Greatly Exaggerated

By Bill Berkowitz

…uing a host of Obama missteps including complaints about the reversal of a number of Bush administration executive orders. Conservative evangelical leaders will engage in a spirited and steadfast attempt to rebuild and reinvigorate a wounded movement, leading to the US Postal Service and direct-mail companies experiencing a surge in business as urgent fundraising appeals pepper the mailboxes and inboxes of religious right supporters. At its worst—…

New Poll: Evangelicals Backing Trump

By Daniel Schultz

…urrently, 78% of white evangelicals support Donald Trump (identical to the number that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012). John McCain? 74%. George W. Bush 2000 and 2004? 68 and 78%, respectively. And despite the whopper of zombie lies told by Ted Cruz, no, 54 million evangelical voters did not stay home in 2012, rather than vote for Romney. In fact, white evangelicals have made up around one-quarter of the electorate ever since 2000. According to Pew…

A Jewish Perspective on Reparations

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

…g, then one can see their fruits in Germany today. Last month, following a number of horrid, hateful slogans chanted at Jews (in the context of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was a large public vigil in Berlin to protest anti-Semitism. Among the attendees were German President Joachim Guack, members of Germany’s parliament, leaders of both of the country’s major churches, an…

Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle

By Michael Schulson

…to varying degrees, the unfortunate love child of Washington D.C.’s stern classicism and Disneyland’s whimsy. Is this convergent evolution? Is there a single divine playbook for subversive Protestantism on these American shores? Does one copy the other? (Patricia Fortuny, a social anthropologist who has studied both LLDM and Mormonism, told me that she doesn’t think LLDM has modeled itself on its older cousin in Utah, although she agrees that the…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…mented at length in RD contributing editor Michelle Goldberg’s forthcoming book, The Means of Reproduction), fertility control certainly bears the cross of a history that includes abuse and coercion of women of color and poor women. Indeed, it still does, though the most recent example in the United States is Louisiana Republican John LaBruzzo’s 2008 proposal to pay poor women $1,000 to sterilize themselves. Predictably, the quasi-civil rights arg…

“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…re so fantastic—brought the idea that the whole thing is static. I think a number of people picked up over the past three hundred years that space is empty, we move things around in space, and there are levers and pulleys and buttons. I think for a number of people, atheism is simply the rejection of somebody sitting on a cloud somewhere with a beard who might intervene from time to time. I think quantum physics, the little I know, it just intuiti…