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Religion No Longer Adequate For The Dalai Lama

By Joanna Piacenza

…een tweaking the guru’s image to better align with our more secular views. Westerners are drawn to Buddhism precisely because of its liberating qualities: As Walpopl Rahula wrote in What the Buddha Taught, arguably the most influential piece of Buddhist literature in the West, the “freedom of thought allowed by the Buddha is unheard of elsewhere in the history of religions.” We do not have to commit to the religion: no tedious rituals, no mandator…

Where are the Blessed Peacemakers?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…e highly developed theologies and philosophies of nonviolence. But, in the West, it is Pauline Christianity which has most deeply shaped both rhetorics of hate and violence and counternarratives of justice and nonviolence. So, understanding what Paul might have been up to and how he has been misread in influential passages such as the one above is particularly important not only for the majority of self-identified Christians who populate the Unite…

Harry Jackson Fundraises for Anti-Obama Campaign

By Peter Montgomery

…white audience that white evangelicals needed to do more than reach out to African Americans on wedge issues; that if they wanted success in the long-term, they would have to do more to confront issues facing the African American community, like poverty and educational opportunities. He said he was worried about racial violence in Florida when George Zimmerman is released, and about the potential for violence if Obama is not re-elected. “I’m conce…

D’Souza: ‘Traditional Values’ for You, Freedom to Follow my Heart for Me

By Peter Montgomery

…es while men did as they pleased.” (page 69) “High rates of divorce in the West can be accounted for by the moral force generated by the secular ethic. Today the woman who leaves her husband says, ‘I felt called to leave. My life would have been a waste if I stayed. My marriage had become a kind of prison. I just had to follow my heart and go with Ted.’ So divorce has become, as it never was before, a form of personal liberation, what Barbara Dafo…

D’Souza Tries to Explain Himself

By Sarah Posner

…udden laxity around his own divorce (isn’t that always the case?) is at odds with his previous pronouncements that “we should live up to our vows and preserve marriage as a lifelong commitment,” and “[h]igh rates of divorce in the West can be accounted for by the moral force generated by the secular ethic.” At least he hasn’t blamed the “secular ethic” for his own failure to know the Christian worldview rules, even as he “presented” and “defended”…

Mitt, Moochers, and Mormonism’s “Other” Legacy

By Mary Barker

…the nineteenth century, Romania Bunnell Pratt was the second woman doctor west of the Mississippi (1877) and one of many Mormon women of the time who were encouraged to attend universities in the East. Utah Territory extended women the right to vote as early as 1869, earning it a visit by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Martha Hughes Cannon, a physician (University of Michigan, 1881), and polygamist Mormon wife, successfully ran agai…

Romney and the End-Times

By Sarah Posner

…8) and “On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south” (Zechariah 14:4). I’ve seen preaching on this by evangelicals; I’ve talked to evangelicals who believe these verses to be true, accurate, and undeniable prophecy of what will happen in Jerusalem. (N.B.: Zechariah was n…

The Speech Mitt Romney Never Gave

By Joanna Brooks

…im Crow South to build the great industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest; or the Jews who fled pogroms and Nazi exterminations. Others have certainly suffered more than Mormons. But we too know the American story of facing loss and finding in our loss the power to build something greater. Our hard work and industry transformed the American West. We dug irrigation canals that brought water from rugged mountains to the American deserts. We bu…

Why the Great Religious Realignment is a Great Secular Opportunity

By Sarah Posner

…felony. Mitt Romney, who endorsed Mourdock and Berg. Representative Allen West and his Islamophobia. Paul Ryan, who hitched his wagon to Ralph Reed and warned voters in the waning days of the campaign that Obama threatens “Judeo-Christian values.” The IRS, for not enforcing its own rule against politicking in the pulpit. The “pulpit freedom” pastors. It was just about a year ago that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops launched its “religious…

Why is Huntsman’s Mormonism “Tough to Define”?

By Joanna Brooks

…ated to a closely kinship-networked group of settlers in the intermountain West, Mormonism was home to all types—both “saloon keepers and proselytizers,” as Huntsman described his ancestors in the Time magazine interview. But over the course of the 20th century, as Mormons migrated out from the Wasatch front and assimilated into the world around us, we drew deeper lines between inside and out. And those lines have often been predicated on orthodo…