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Mitt Romney and the Ghost of Anti-Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…American population. The Republican primaries gave that small slice a megaphone: the artificial loudness of their voice makes people overestimate their number. That said, it will be interesting to see what happens now in the general election when you may begin to hear from another voice that is anxious not so much about Mormonism per se but about any candidate that is too religious. And if Mormonism is anything in the American mind, it is a group…

Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating

By Beatrice Marovich

…om of religious traditions that we finally find the spiritual purity we’re looking for? The sort that can clean our dirty hands from the inside out, starting with our nasty and brutish souls? A Screaming Silence My own thinking around religion and animals, particularly around the conundrum of eating them, was complexified at a recent conference, put on by the Graduate Student’s Association in Columbia’s Religion Department. The consumption of anim…

Are “Pro-Life” Hispanic Catholics the Democrats’ Future?

By Patricia Miller

…be illegal in most or all cases, versus 41% of all Americas. But a closer look at the polling suggests that conservative attitudes toward abortion are less likely to hold in the emerging Latino majority. The Pew survey found that almost all the difference in Hispanic attitudes about abortion could be accounted for by greater conservatism among immigrant Hispanics: Nearly six-in-ten (58%) immigrant Hispanics say abortion should mainly be illegal….

The Auspicious Timing of Glenn Beck’s Zeal for Zion

By Shalom Goldman

…y to fans for whom the State of Israel is God’s favorite, and can literally do no wrong. As Jerry Falwell stated in the 1960s, “Israel is God’s timepiece. When I want to understand what is happening in history—I look at what is happening to Israel.” And if we want to understand the career of a conservative Christian personality like Beck, perhaps we need only take a good look at his relationship to Israel….

Virgins and Vampire Worship: The Religion of Twilight

By Linda Kay Klein

…they receive from society regarding how a girl or woman is supposed how to look, act and feel: Be good, but not too good; be sexy, but not too sexy. In Twilight, readers can coolly live a perfect balance of the contradictions, embodying both the sacred and the profane. Bella is a virgin until marriage, but she wants sex and wants it bad; Bella chooses a vampire life with Edward, representing strength and independence, but she didn’t really have to…

Tainted Love: The Cost of Sojourners’ Refusal to Take Sides on LGBT Issues

By Jamie L. Manson

…into most churches and church-related activities with deep trepidation. We look around the room to see if we can locate any congregants that “appear gay.” We know to avoid holding hands during prayers unless we feel confident that it’s a safe space. We know not to be immediately forthcoming about our relationship if someone talks to us after the service. Regardless of what good work we do for the church, our efforts will be seen by many church pe…

Religion for Atheists for The Rest of Us

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…tion in the advantages of recognizing our paltriness.” And he doesn’t just look to moral wisdom in religious texts; he appears to also appreciate the practices of religious rituals: Religions… sit us down in unfamiliar spaces, adjust our posture, regulate what we eat, give us scripts detailing what we should say to one another… all this not in order to deny us freedom but to quell our anxieties and flex our moral capacities. All well and good. So…

The Broken Promise of Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘The Goop Lab’

By Daniel Albert Joslyn

…of us must make do with less and less. Goop is a product of—and an amazing look into—the inner world of the winners of this shake-up. The company is made up of professional, successful people, working in a wildly successful start-up, allowed to take part in a globally-syndicated documentary series, all while living in and around Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest areas in the world’s wealthiest country. And they are all—fundamentally—miserable. As…

Toward a Non-Malignant Faith: An Interview with Brian McLaren

By Peter Laarman

…to describe what applying the right amount of “creative disturbance” might look like, not just in doctrine but in liturgy and mission. I spoke to McLaren while he was braving “carmageddon” in Los Angeles this past fall. Talk about why so many liberal Christians, pastors included, run from their own Christianity—why they have been so slow to embrace the kind of “strong-benevolent” faith that you are writing about in this book? I think some of the…

The Passion of the Slayer: On Buffy’s Twentieth, “The Big Bad” Is Still Out There

By Elijah Prewitt-Davis

…or political activism, for religious reflection, and of course, for a good look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Needless to say I first watched the show with high expectations, expectations that were always exceeded. There are, of course, the most frequently commented-on aspects of the show. The overt feminism that upends the horror genre theme of a girl being chased by monsters, turning her into the one that does the chasing, or as Buffy says: “I’m…