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New Book on Trump and Evangelicals Gets it Mostly Right

By Greg Carey

…tories within evangelicalism. Fea repeatedly notes evangelicals’ mixed (at best) history with respect to race relations. He devotes nine pages to the history of racial fear in the evangelical South, but he never gets messy with the most telling factor: that no other religious group even remotely approaches white evangelicals’ preference for Trump. Race proved one of the most decisive predictors of Trump support, and white evangelicals were the mos…

Election Reporters: Here’s Why Simply Descriptors Like ‘Christians’ Can Have Enormous Consequences

By Daniel Schultz

…For a lot of reasons, conservative Christians tend to own the cultural megaphone today. (Most important among them: conservative judges endorsing extremist conservative Christian arguments.) So I don’t expect the average person to understand all the nuances. But journalists covering national politics, especially those on the Trump beat, need to do better. Here’s why. First of all, it’s a matter of accuracy. As Sarah Posner points out on Bluesky, t…

How “Mindfulness” Lost Its Mind

By Thomas Joiner

….g., health, education) but: a) it is no miraculous panacea even under the best of conditions; and b) it can be pernicious when mixed with a focus on the self; selflessness is part of the essence of mindfulness, and self-focus perverts it. Regarding its being a panacea, I show in the book how even the best-designed, most robust research on mindfulness is overhyped. Regarding the pernicious effects of self-focus, those are general in a species that…

Aliens, Nanobots, & Microbes: The Science of Secular Apocalypse

By Michael Schulson

…o had kids. A lot of them are very open to debate. And so we went out on a number of occasions and had two or three drinks and talked about the ethics of having a kid. There are legitimate questions to be asked, just at an existential level, about whether it’s right to bring something into the world that will suffer—and also experience pleasure—but will suffer and eventually perish. Let’s imagine the best world we can imagine. Is it right to bring…

No, THIS is the Real Christianity…

By Ira Chernus

…is Harold Meyerson’s column, “Hard-Liners for Jesus.” Meyerson, one of the best mainstream pundits out there, charges that there is a huge gap between the teachings of the gospels and the preachings of the “Gospel’s Own Party.” The GOPers tout the old-time religion while violating its biblical precepts, or—to be more exact—the particular biblical precepts that Meyerson approves. He has an easy time finding contradictions between Republican policie…

Falling in Love With the Earth: Francis’ Faithful Ecology

By Jacob J. Erickson

…biodiversity. (Yale’s Forum for Religion and Ecology assembles some of the best of that content here.) As I read through Laudato si I saw much of the speculation confirmed. Pope Francis reflects on our various ecological ills. He reflects on anthropogenic/human-caused global warming, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, the dangers of unlimited consumerism, the dangers of unlimited and overused technology, “a misguided anthropocentrism,” economic gr…

Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness

By Beatrice Marovich

…er words, that in the worst case, theology and science were at war. In the best case, I assumed, they had a rather awkward relationship—something like bad first date. And then I read Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (Routledge, 2003). What occurred was nothing short of a paradigm shift. What Keller was up to was beyond me—in the very best way. She wasn’t doing apologetics (defending theology from its outside objectors)….

David Brat: Catholic, Calvinist, and Libertarian, Oh My!

By Julie Ingersoll

…model, is severely restrained in its authority over economic activity. The best check on the depravity of individuals who make up the civil government is the decentralization of authority into the distinct spheres; the best check on the depravity of human beings in the economy is the decentralization of the market created by competition. Historian Michael McVicar has this called this “theocratic libertarianism”: it creates an economic zone free of…

The Roots of the American Right’s Muslim Brotherhood Panic

By Sarah Posner

…nt on subverting the constitutional republic. Just yesterday, Gaffney reiterated his shari’ah claims: As the Center for Security Policy’s new, best-selling Team B II report entitled, Shariah: The Threat to America, found, It is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in Amer…

The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

By Neil Ellingson

…nd early thirties. The priest had done something else unusual with a consecrated object during what must have been a baptismal preparation class. He took a one-dollar bill out of his wallet, struck a match, and lit the perfectly good, perfectly legal tender on fire. It caught flame quickly, as if it had been ready for it. The priest held it by a corner over a small metal bowl that caught the black glowing flakes of paper ash, not dropping it until…