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Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

By Paula M. Cooey

…nine on the Richter scale. It devastated the population. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 10,000 to 100,000. At the time the quake struck, worshipers filled the churches honoring their dead. The churches, the worshippers, and the city around them were effectively destroyed. Not long after the major quake hit, a tsunami followed that killed those who had rushed to the beaches in fear to avoid the havoc of the earthquake. The cat…

Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

By Mark Hulsether

…5) Robertson plays his part in the Iran-Contra scandal. During the Central American civil wars of the 1980s, Robertson helped fund “cities of refuge” in Guatemala (what were called “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam), and camps for Nicaraguan Contras. Today, in the aftermath of wars started by Bush and Cheney (also supported by Robertson), these might seem trivial in scale. Nevertheless in the 1980s allies of Reagan, funded illegally through the Iran-…

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…ays they believe in Heaven: When asked, “Do you believe in heaven?” 80% of Americans answer yes. But almost no one has a clear idea of what it is they believe. I hope my book gives people a sense of what Western religious traditions and regular people say heaven is (and isn’t) and how those ideas have changed through history. I hope that my book will provoke readers to develop for themselves a clearer and more thought-out idea of heaven, whatever…

Lo and Behold, the Sacredness of the Internet

By Martyn Smith

…internet as a result of the inexorable working out of Moore’s Law. As the number of transistors on a chip grew exponentially, computers became smaller, and then they became “personal,” and then they fit in our pockets as a phone. “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,” at the Computer History Museum In this telling, the internet was not a unique “Columbus” event, but an evolution dependent on the shrinking size and growing capacity of co…

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

By Patricia Miller

…and the church insisted that Catholics opposed the decision, a significant number of Catholics similarly ignored them, having decided that on matters of sexuality the hierarchy wasn’t to be trusted? It’s that split within Catholicism that freed up Catholics to affiliate with whatever political party best met their priorities: social justice issues for left-leaning Catholics and sexual restraint, law-and-order, and a muscular national defense for r…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…stitutions for youth will be stripped bare because of lawsuit payouts, and number of vocations, already low, will become even lower because of the stigma attached to being a priest. The test of Moral Credibility has been found wanting, and the handwriting is on the wall. Even the National Catholic Reporter’s editorial page has called for the Pope to provide answers. No doubt about it, this is perhaps the second biggest crisis in “Christendom,” out…

An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

By Anne Eggebroten

…Benedict XVI set in motion any change to canon law? Will he step down or ask any complicit bishops to resign? Will he even order a Church-wide investigation? Unlikely. Instead, his moral authority will continue to erode. The number of priests will continue to dwindle. Catholic women will assume more and more administrative and other posts, and the hypocrisy of refusing to ordain them will become increasingly apparent. The house of cards will fall…

Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

By Paul Wallace

…ith every outward step, as our universe and our ignorance grows, so do the number of potential space alien hideouts. So does the belief that there must be someone out there. So every time I read about the discovery of a new Earth-like planet or read about NASA’s upcoming Kepler planet-finding mission or watch a movie like Contact, I grow excited over—and, like Brahe, even a little afraid of—the vast unknown. My mind boggles. What’s really out ther…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…n’s beneficial impact. But “over half of those who seldom or never attend [services] and close to one in the three Americans who say religion is not important to them personally still say it would be positive for society if more Americans were religious.” What planet do these Americans live on? Here in the U.S., religious fervor is at the center of a 30-year culture war that has debased civic discourse and rendered our nation ungovernable. Worldwi…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…