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“I’ll Pray For You”—Powerful or Pointless?

By Christine Wicker

…d who lives in Texas grits her teeth every time she hears someone tuck her problems away with the promise to do something she’d rather they didn’t. Turkish author Orhan Pamuk gave one of my favorite practices a killing clout when he noted how often praying for those we pity comforts us while distancing us from the need to do anything else. During my times as a newspaper reporter, I once asked a former nun named Elizabeth Espersen, who directed Dal…

God’s Obituary: A Humanist Response to Mass Murder

By Anthony B. Pinn

…ce. Deep silence, in which we struggle for human resolve to confront human problems. Please do not misunderstand me: I am not saying we should say nothing, that we should do nothing. I am not suggesting that complacency is the proper response, nor am I arguing that these events should be ignored. Rather, I am proposing silence concerning God, silence concerning efforts to make things better through theological twist and turns, and through the reva…

Guns and Babies: What Newtown Does NOT Teach Us

By Anthea Butler

…re a vicious, violent nation. And these days it’s our violence most of all that makes us stand out. Americans must begin to assess our humanity, and view each other as human beings, rather than target practice. Violence and promoting a violent Christian God does not solve the nation’s problems. It creates more of them. For those like Brody, Huckabee, and Fischer who see tragedy and want to prescribe more violence and proclaim the glories of a vio…

Archbishops Try to Hold it Together, Order Re-Vote on Women Bishops

By Joanna Brooks

…space for minority perspectives and what emerges, really, is a concern for numbers. As one of the authors of the Times letter, Tom Sutcliffe, wrote elsewhere, “I absolutely do not want to see the Church of England ending up as a result of our in my view correct determination to include women in the ordained ministry at all levels with an even smaller footprint. I do not want the Church to vote to shrink more, and there is no doubt that the ordinat…

Does Analytic Thinking Erode Religious Belief?

By Andrew Aghapour

…ction leads people to become less religious. Yet there are two fundamental problems with this scientific story, and they will take us from St. Thomas Aquinas to Canadian undergraduates. St. Thomas Aquinas, Atheist Problem One is the assumption that religious and non-religious belief can fit neatly into two cognitive boxes, where “intuitive thinking” is religious and “analytic thinking” is rational and secular. Even if there are two distinctive cog…

Iranian Musician Receives Death Threats

By Hussein Rashid

…ng subtext of the religious authorities being the cause of much of what is wrong with Iran—the return of Naqi would show the people what real religion is about. This sort of poetry, of appealing to a “higher authority” for the problems of Muslims is not new within Islamicate literatures. Most notable is the author Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), who wrote in both Urdu and Persian. His poem “Shikwa” (Complaint) is about a Muslim crying out to God for rel…

Hell 101: A Back-to-School Reflection on the Persistence of Belief in Eternal Punishment

By Hollis Phelps

…eals. Feuerbach’s understanding of religion is, of course, not without its problems, especially when it comes to his idealization of human nature. but it helps to explain why hell continues to exercise such a grip on religious identity. Although Feuerbach himself tended to stress the more positive elements of human nature and, by extension, religion, the same basic idea of projection applies equally as well to the more negative aspects of human na…

What Makes Mormons Weird?

By Joanna Brooks

…living prophets, eternal marriages, new books of scripture creates its own problems for the Mormon public image, a sense of radical disconnection between exterior and interior. And that sense of disconnection, of the public not quite matching the private, is only exacerbated by the insularity of Mormon communities, the secrecy of Mormon temple rites, and the privacy of faith practices like wearing sacred undergarments. Our difference—it’s there—un…

NOM Claims Victimhood for the Holidays

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ave absolutely no problem with someone believing that marriage equality is wrong—as long as they don’t then take that belief and beat me over the head with it or use that belief to write laws that enshrine my place as a second-class citizen in a country where I work and pay taxes and should be entitled to the same rights as everyone else. There can be no true tolerance until the guy with the club can be convinced to drop his weapon; to realize tha…

Opposition To DADT Repeal And The High Rate Of Evangelical Chaplains

By Sarah Posner

…d by yielding to an evangelical panic over repealing DADT. The increased numbers of evangelical chaplains began getting media attention around 2005, when the constitutional and morale problems arising out of aggressive evangelizing in the military began coming to light. (Anne C. Loveland, author of American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993, dates the trend back to the Vietnam War.) New York Times, 2005: There are also growing number…