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Devil’s Bookmark: Doubting God’s Existence, but Angry Nevertheless

By Bernard Schweizer

…s Dark Materials), Philip Pullman is teaching his readers that they should look to liberal, secular values to give meaning to their lives and that they should despise deities as the dispensers of morality. By identifying him as a misotheist, all I’m doing is holding Pullman-the-teacher accountable for the contents of his own lesson. Referring back to the diagram introduced above, it becomes quite obvious that authors do in fact tend to dramatize t…

Religion and Violence? Short Answer: “Religion” Does Not Exist in a Vacuum

By Matt Recla

…goes unnoticed, but it sometimes rises to the surface, particularly as we look to the Divine to answer the “whys” of tragedy. Though many in the West are able to hold their religion loosely, it too facilitates the perpetration of violence in less direct forms, violence perpetrated elsewhere. As a result, we too stand to lose in frank conversation about the relationship between religion and violence, because we will have to confront the ways relig…

Harold Camping, Prophet of Apocalypse, Dies at 92

By Daniel Silliman

…s us to wait further upon Him.” Camping ended, in many ways, in the same place he had begun. “In our search in the Bible,” he said, “we must continue to look in the Bible, look to the Bible. Because there is where truth comes from.”…

Endangered Speeches: Why It Matters (For All of Us) That Conservative Seminaries Are Firing Professors Over Theology

By Steve A. Wiggins

…yone who values higher education. The serious study of religion is made to look parochial and foolish to those in other academic disciplines when minor differences of opinion are grounds for dismissal. In the case of religious studies a professor is dismissed, in all likelihood, for simply being honest. That’s a worrisome fact in anyone’s book. Academic freedom, anyone? When religious institutions can’t bear honesty, where are we to look for relig…

AIDS Anniversary: Thirty is the New Eternity

By Susan Henking

…estone. Activism, too, lives on. It survives. The anniversary pushed me to look up ACT UP, thinking it was long gone—a relic of another era. No. ACT UP New York continues. (In fact, there are two places to check this out: here and here.) Public service announcements live on as well. (Have you watched any television lately?) Paradoxically, die-ins live on, a form of protest characterizing ACT UP and other activist actions (think of Stop the Church)…

Unmasking the “Veiled Prophet” Behind a 135-Year-Old St. Louis Tradition

By Spencer Dew

…nt, complete with majorettes and marching bands, this event likely did not look, to most spectators, much like a manifestation of “religion.” But the backstory of this ordinary-seeming street festival reveals elaborate connections between religious vocabulary and the policing of American racial boundaries, the power of capitalism and its reliance upon class distinction, the use of entertainment as a means to squelch labor unrest—not to mention arc…

Royal Wedding Ceremony Quite Dated, Hats Notwithstanding

By Mary E. Hunt

…as second to none, making even the weekend’s beatification of John Paul II look a little pale. No one, simply no one does hats and fascinators like the Brits. Even the horses are a little more gussied up in England. The Queen herself set the pace with a yellow outfit from head to toe. One commenter suggested that she looked like a Peep, those pastel marshmallow treats, but I thought it became her and fit the occasion. So there. Let me stipulate fu…

Pope Francis Says Teaching Gender Is Nasty; Far-Right Religious Groups Helping Mexico’s Anti-Equality Movement; Colombia’s Peace Deal Killed by Anti-LGBT Campaign?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…the mercy of God, the truth … always with an open heart.” Mexico: In-depth look at forces behind anti-marriage-equality movement BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder and Diego Olavarría published an in-depth story on the backlash to marriage equality, which has included rallies across the country over the past month. This was not simply a spontaneous backlash to the president’s proposal. This was an event more than a year in the making, coordinated by a networ…

Why The Religious Left Isn’t Coming Together, and Why It Matters

By Daniel Schultz

…ls don’t want “religious authoritarians” showing up in the religious left, look no further than the recently dropped “fetal heartbeat” bill in Iowa, which would have established criminal penalties for doctors performing abortions after 20 weeks and given parents control over adult women’s bodies. Conservatives may know that killing an unborn child is always and everywhere wrong, but liberals know that women need to make sometimes agonizing choices…

Beyond ‘Thoughts and Prayers’: How the Christian Right’s Politics of Providentialism Keeps America from Addressing Gun Violence

By Chrissy Stroop

…onsistently refuse to look inward for solutions to their problems, instead looking to “the culture” for factors to blame that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. These beliefs themselves—beliefs that difference is a thing to be afraid of; that refusal to believe in the right-wing Christian version of God will result in severe punishment; that allowing frequent violence to continue is preferable to a scalable government solution—are expressions o…