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Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

By Sarah Posner

…at Obama has had a most remarkable right-leaning spiritual evolution from Chicago to Washington. Considering Newsweek chose this list to represent the increasingly “diffuse” movement, it missed much of what makes it tick. The people on the list represent a visible slice of the Christian right (or don’t represent the Christian right at all) but it’s precisely because the movement is diffuse that the list doesn’t offer much in the way of illuminatio…

American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

By Richard Flory

…nect between politics, culture and what people are looking for in church, this shift represents a failure on the part of most churches to provide a message and organizational structure that will both attract and retain church members. This will likely continue, but will churches adapt by figuring out what people want in church, or will they continue to stagnate and decline? On the other hand, what alternative forms, if any, of “church” might peopl…

Rise of Episcopal Village

By Becky Garrison

…church leaders, who are rethinking how they “do church.” The reasons for this shift in thinking are myriad and have only intensified since 2008 when a number of studies indicated that for the first time in US history, less than 50 percent of Americans classified themselves as “Christian.” Such shifts in church decline have been documented in the Church of England (UK) for decades. As reported by the Rev. Steve Hollinghurst, Researcher in Evangeli…

Bush Has Helped the Scarecrow of American Religion

By Hussein Rashid

…for them), and a group called Faithful Democrats is really for Christians only (their current website makes this clear, but their earlier public face did not). President Bush can and should be maligned for a great number of things. However, he should also be credited for good things as well. Intentionally or not, his conception of religion has pushed us to talk about religion more intelligently than we have so far….

When Corporations are “Persons” Under the Law: The Real Problem With Health Care

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…the settling of (certain) accounts. There is a chilling message in all of this. Our history is an ambivalent and ambiguous and violent one. It has worked against justice as often as not. A War waged in part over the question of federalism, and in part over the questionable justice of human enslavement, ended in the drafting of a constitutional amendment intended to answer both questions, once and for all. And what happened? The protections intende…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…ous weaknesses in the Charter have become painfully clear. In February, a Philadelphia grand jury found “substantial evidence” of abuse committed by thirty-seven priests in active ministry. Cardinal Justin Rigali, after initially claiming that there were no “admitted” or “confirmed” abusers in ministry, subsequently suspended twenty-seven clerics. And in May, the chair of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia review board revealed that the archdiocese h…

Obstacles for Secularists

By Sarah Posner

…nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rituals, sacred texts, and physical spaces that all serve to bind the participants together. Atheism has none of these things—most of the time it’s an individual choice, made and kept alone. In my piece, I point out how even Democrats still resort to appeal…

Dispatch from Charlottesville: “It Was a War Zone. It Felt Like There Were a Million Nazis.”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…nk that surprise reflects a whole lot of white privilege. Let me just say this: This happened in part because the state is complicit in white supremacy. The police being behind barricades, or inside Emancipation Park, smiling and laughing, while people are getting the shit beat out of them, is not just a reflection of the police “pulling back,” it is a reflection of their being complicit. And we, as counter-protestors, and as people who were tryin…

Missing the Anger for the Shoes

By Hussein Rashid

…y Service, amongst other security agencies, and only had a shoe to express his hatred of President Bush. The point is that this man was traumatized by the war. He wanted to express his anger. He had a shoe. He threw the shoe. Is this really so hard to understand? Do we as Americans treat having a shoe thrown at us as a sign of happiness or joy? We have become so conditioned to seeing Arabs and Muslims as the “Other” that we have to process simple…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…ho is and shall be in infinite/ages of ages.” Where Latin Christianity was hierarchical, Celtic Christianity was individualist; since the former preached dominion over creation, the latter saw humanity as being integrated within nature; when the first was abjectly patriarchal, the second was steadfastly oriented towards the divine feminine. An anti-clerical Christianity privileging not priests, but parishioners. Since 1938, the ecumenical Iona Com…