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Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…that anyone who cares to devote time and effort to understanding evolution can do it. As difficult as it can be, science is, in a very real sense, right there on the page. In fact, in the end there is nothing for it but to be out in the open, to be seen, to be comprehended. This is one of the great joys of science. Though it has its own joys, theology does not operate this way. Religion does not make sense as a set of strictly empirical claims. It…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexual feelings or become a bit more bi. And possibly none who turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do not prove that categorical change in sexual orientation is possible for everyone or anyone, but rather that meaningful shifts along a continuum that constit…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…s; they endlessly call for, but are never exhausted by, interpretation. Chicago cabby George Downs expressed something similar at the 1967 unveiling of the Picasso sculpture: “The longer you look, the more you see. That’s what art should be.” Art has the power of inexhaustible revelation, raising questions endlessly, and compelling intellect, imagination, and emotion to exceed their usual boundaries through the very act of interpretation. In his e…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…uth that religious and sexual identities at times clash, that such clashes can cause suffering, and that not all people resolve that clash in favor of sexual identity. But, after years of studying and writing about reparative therapy and the ex-gay movement, and after reading Rich Wyler’s own account of his sexual conversion, I found NPR’s story, and Schumacher-Matos’ defense of it, shallow and dispiriting. Married with Children There is much to c…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…Here is what Schumacher-Matos surmises: In 2009, a task force of the American Psychological Association came out clearly against trying to convert someone’s sexuality because of its harm and ineffectiveness; we are who we are and homosexuality is not something to “treat”. But at the same time, they acknowledged that acting on same-sex attractions is not appealing to all who have them. The task force supported “identity therapy” for some religious…

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…of gay groups to ‘persuade this society by manipulation or dishonest political campaigning.’” Chaplin sees nothing wrong with the church and state speaking together with one voice. “The idea of an inevitable conflict between the church and the state is a peculiarity of Western civilization,” he says. “For the Orthodox civilization and way of life, as well as Islamic civilization, the very idea of the conflict between the religious community and po…

Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

By Sarah Posner

…anging and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal scholar Melissa Rogers is most decidedly not a member of the Christian right. Rogers, who has worked for the pro-church-state-separation gr…

What Do ‘The Christians’ Believe? Easter Reflections from a Non-Christian

By Gary Laderman

…iences and moral communities producing ever-increasing differences. Specifically, it can be understood as what historian Philip Jenkins identifies as the global consequences of Christianity’s shifting worldwide alignment to the southern hemisphere; particularly Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How this realignment—‘de-Europeanization’ might be overstating it, but not by much—of Christian communities in America affects politics, ecumenical relation…

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

By Sunnivie Brydum

…detail literally picked us up and moved us. I’m almost losing my shorts, because I can’t hold on to everything. And then they just put us inside the press barricade, where uniformed police officers and state troopers were not doing a damned thing. At that point, projectiles started being thrown through Emancipation Park. We don’t know what they were, but we were told that these nazi groups were taking soda cans and putting concrete in them, and us…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…raphic research with the AVA, which led to a paper I presented at the American Academy of Religion. I frankly did not expect to be taken seriously simply because I was discussing vampires. To my surprise, I was contacted by several scholarly journals as well as reporters. It was Praeger who approached me about writing a book. They had noticed a heightened interest in vampires in the wake of Twilight and the Charlaine Harris novels—phenomena I wa…