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Most U.S. Catholics Back Marriage Equality, But Knights of Columbus Pour Millions into Opposition

By Peter Montgomery

…inancial power comes from a huge and profitable life insurance business it promotes through local councils and parishes. It funnels millions of dollars to the pope and bishops’ conferences as well as to more service-oriented charities. “The Strong Right Arm of the Bishops: The Knights of Columbus and Anti-Marriage Equality Funding,” documents $6.25 million in direct Knights funding to anti-marriage equality campaigns at the national level and in…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…(Praeger, release date: May 30, 2009). What inspired you to write Vampires Today? What sparked your interest? Some people think I study vampires simply because they are unusual. I’ve even been asked if I am a vampire myself. The reality is that I became interested in the vampire community when I learned of a massive survey being conducted by the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (AVA). Their project was relevant to the sociology of knowledge: instead of de…

Anger, Privilege, and Invisible Injustice: What Cain and Abel Have to Do With Ferguson

By Eva Mroczek

…his head, killing him. Cain and Abel’s remarkable argument is little known today, but it is not a mere blip on the radar of biblical interpretation. It exists in different versions in other Targum manuscripts, including fragments found in the Cairo Geniza, showing that it was discussed, revised, and transmitted across Jewish communities. And it is representative of a concern with justice we can see in many other texts where Jewish interpreters gra…

Romney Accuses Obama of Stifling Religious Liberty

By Sarah Posner

Today, the Washington Examiner published an op-ed from Mitt Romney, “President Obama versus Religious Liberty:” The Obama administration is at it again. They are now using Obamacare to impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away. This is the same Mitt Romney who could barely utter a word about religious freedom for his own faith when it was under assault by some of his fellow conse…

Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…“Christ figure.” In the immortal words of Woody Allen, “If Jesus came back today and saw what was going on in his name, he wouldn’t stop throwing up.” It is safe to say that Allen’s comments can be applied to a lot of religious film criticism. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? As with the above point the main audience is, I hope, students. I tried to write this in an accessible way, introducing key themes in religious studies…

Jesus Hates Taxes: Biblical Capitalism Created Fertile Anti-Union Soil

By Peter Montgomery

…of employers to come to individual agreements with each employee. Jesus’ parable, he said, is “anti-minimum wage” and “anti-socialist-union kind of stuff.” (This is just one of the parables of Jesus cited by Barton and others in support of laissez-faire economic policies.) The religious right’s anti-union roots are long and deep. Researchers have traced them through the teachings of R.J. Rushdoony, an intellectual godfather of sorts for much of t…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ut American religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…r final burial. The prospect of Barack Obama as the first president of the United States with African American ancestry is a thrilling possibility for so many, yet also cannot be disassociated from America’s shameful slaveholding past and the ghosts of so many Africans who died so that slavery might live, and African Americans brutally killed as a result of prejudice, hatred, and injustice. In our enlightened, scientific age, we don’t believe in t…

High Ark: A Geologist on the True Meaning of Noah’s Flood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…s shortchange the wonder of nature. The more the story makes sense according to nature, the more astounding it becomes. There may be no point arguing over whether the Bible’s flood story is literally true. But it does not follow for you that the story has no meaning. No, it’s a parable. To me it says: we are Noah on the planet, we are the stewards. Noah’s Flood tells the story of the way that nature made it into the future. And that’s a challenge…

How a Group of Catholic Pacifists Took on the Nuclear State

By Eric C. Miller

…h far less frequently than in earlier decades. Plowshares activists in the United States have never been acquitted of the charges brought against them, which include conspiracy, sabotage, and destruction of government property. They have received prison sentences of up to eighteen years. Because these actions carry such a high risk of legal consequences and bodily harm—many take place in deadly force areas—many in the larger Catholic Left regard P…