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My Childhood Hobby Was Satanic, Or So They Told Me

By Joseph Laycock

…aying games seemed so threatening to some people. Some of the most ardent crusaders against role-playing games seemed to have been deeply disturbed by the idea that their worldview could actually be a game, no more real than the worlds created in D&D. They never came out and said this, of course, but in their jeremiads about the dangers of these games, they occasionally tipped their hands. I think the claim that D&D is not a game but an “occult re…

Boy Gets Boy, Saves Earth: A Gay Christian Writer’s Plan to Change the World

By Nick Street

…t people get behind,” Moore said in a telephone interview from his home in New York City. “The heroes die terrible deaths or endure terrible tragedies. And the characters like us that we see on TV are often the gay version of the Stepin Fetchit stereotype. Mine will be the first show where the gay character is a true hero and he isn’t doomed.” Moore’s novel, a “Best of 2008” selection by the young-adult division of the American Library Association…

Yale Clings to Racist Legacy… And Cash. Lots of Cash.

By Peter Laarman

…DuBois’s take-them-down campaign was not very much on the minds of Yale’s trustees in May 1931. Their defiant response: name a gorgeous new gothically-crafted residential college for the man who epitomizes white supremacy, Sen. Calhoun. Calhoun College originally featured a large stained glass window with shackled slaves kneeling at Sen. Calhoun’s feet. The offensive part of that window was discreetly removed in 1992, but many smaller windows with…

What Did the Puritans Have Against Christmas?

By Bruce David Forbes

…ed: Germans, Scandinavians, and the Dutch who founded New Amsterdam (later New York). So Lutherans, Catholics, and the Dutch Reformed celebrated Christmas, along with the Church of England that continued restrained Christmas observances. As a result of this mixture, in the American colonies and then in the new nation, there was no national consensus supporting Christmas, and the disagreement was between Christians. American Christmas wouldn’t come…

AIDS Anniversary: Thirty is the New Eternity

By Susan Henking

…ok 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) and now defined in large measure as anti-war protest; though it continues to…

Speaker Mike Johnson to Allow Privately Run National Prayer Breakfast into the Heart of the Capitol

By Jonathan Larsen

…the politics of individual board members “play no role” in its decisions. News of the new venue came in a Jan. 15 email to members of Congress. Heitkamp and fellow board member former Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) provided members with new details on the event and location. (Hultgren is a longtime Family insider who has met with anti-LGBTQ+ leaders on trips paid for by The Family.) In their email, Heitkamp and Hultgren announced that the NPB Foundat…

A Catholic House Divided Over Reproductive Health Care: Bishops Launch a New Campaign

By Frances Kissling

…billing procedures, and staffing. While some of these practices have been ruled unacceptable, many have passed both local bishops’ and Vatican scrutiny. They are considered “material cooperation,” but not formal. It is not the intention of the Catholic staff or institution to provide those services, it does not formally provide them, and it expresses its disapproval in this way. In some instances the facility is even more removed from the acts as…

Religious Exemptions and the New Non-Culture Wars

By Sarah Posner

…olic Bishops said HHS had granted it exemptions from similar language. The new interim rule, then, seeks eliminate that negotiated exemption, and to codify the requirements for a full range of services. That codification would prevent “taxpayer money being used to harm others,” according to the American Civil Liberty Union’s Deputy Legal Director Louise Melling. In other words, the taxpayer money argument goes both ways: taxpayers who support thes…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…uccessful elements, sometimes achieving a nonsectarian approach, but other times lapsing—sometimes considerably—into religious bias of the kinds noted by federal courts. The courses of twenty-one districts were thoroughly religious in nature, sometimes openly promoting particular beliefs. The most successful courses typically had several characteristics in common. They recognized that no single religious tradition had a monopoly on the Bible, but…

New Study: Motivation Doesn’t Improve Group Success

By Arri Eisen

…career success, and ‘even life expectancy’. Now, even more surprising is a new study in the journal Science demonstrating that just such a factor exists for collective intelligence in the performance of human groups. Woolley et al. show the same intriguing correlation between a group’s ability to perform one type of task and entirely unrelated ones—a group good at one is more likely good at the other. This is provocative stuff. Not only were group…