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Houston’s Pastor Subpoenas: A Meme Made for Fox News

By Sarah Posner

…law would bar businesses from denying a transgender person entry to a restroom consistent with his or her gender identity. After the city attorney ruled that many of the signatures collected for the referendum petition were invalid, the petitioners no longer had the requisite number of signatures to place the referendum on the ballot. The subpoenas, served on pastors who are not litigants in the lawsuit, seek a broad range of documents and communi…

The Trouble With Francis: Three Things That Worry Me

By Mary E. Hunt

…personal direction of this pope: a simple lifestyle, a commitment to the poor, a soft touch with those who are young or ill, all indicate a fine human being, indeed what Christianity would hold up as a model. I note only that his predecessor popes and some of their episcopal sycophants gave the job such a bad name that the bar is low. Undoing their structures and policies, especially regarding criminal sexual scandals and Vatican finances, will t…

5 Key Moments From the Year of the ‘Exvangelicals’

By Chrissy Stroop

…vative, mostly white evangelicals have controlled their own narrative for too long. While the exvangelical community lacks their institutional infrastructure and deep pockets, we have nevertheless—no doubt assisted by the sustained robust support for Trump from white evangelicals—managed to curtail the evangelical establishment’s control over their media representation, and we have managed to get our voices heard. This is a momentous accomplishmen…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…working for peace and racial justice. I had grown up in a Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore with a strong sense that community, neighborhood itself, was warmly Jewish; that freedom and justice were profoundly, hotly “Jewish and beyond”—and that Jewish religion was boring boiler-plate. Except for celebrating the Passover Seder, which brought family, community, freedom, and justice around the same dinner table, I had long abandoned the rhythms of Je…

Prayer of the Day: Raising Hell

By Sarah Posner

…age against the machine. On Monday, Kaplan writes: Rev. Eugene Barnes of Bloomington, Illinois, offered an emotional prayer against “money changers” and for the “ragtag band” before him. Farmer activist Larry Ginter of Des Moines, Iowa, got the crowd back on its feet with, “I know you can’t raise corn on the streets of Chicago—but can you raise a little hell?” Even Senator Dick Durban stirred the crowd as he railed against loans with “tricks and t…

Billy Graham, Most Famous Religious Figure of 20th C, Dies at 99

By Randall Balmer

…ine years old. In a career that extended well over half a century, Graham took a simple evangelical message—give your heart to Jesus, and you will be “born again”—to millions around the world. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the organization he founded to facilitate his ministry, boasted that Graham preached to more people than anyone else in history, a claim that probably cannot be verified but is almost certainly true. Early Life Born…

You Are Being Organized by Something: 10 Questions for Kathryn Lofton on Consuming Religion

By Kathryn Lofton

…you to write Consuming Religion? Restlessness. After I finished my first book, I realized quickly that I left several major questions without satisfying answers. First, why does progressive change seem to need to be represented first in conservative drag? The simplest example of this could be seen in the figure of Michelle Obama, who found herself schooled during the electoral process into becoming a political mannequin because the American publi…

Making College Great Again: Evangelical Outsiders in the Age of Trump

By Adam Laats

…fined their parents’ generation. Yet careful observers warn not to assume too much. Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education Adam Laats Oxford University Press Mar 1, 2018 On evangelical college campuses especially, it can be difficult to tell which way the culture-war winds are blowing. At Liberty University, for example, a group of alumni returned their diplomas in a move one rightly called “shocking.” No one expects that…

Park 51 and RLUIPA, Or, Conservatives Hoisted On Their Petard

By Daniel Schultz

…ous Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, Park 51 is on solid legal footing. If you’re not familiar with RLUIPA, as it’s called, the basic thrust is to prohibit local governments from using zoning laws to limit unfairly how churches and other religious institutions use their property. It forbids, for example, developing suburbs from leaving no space for churches or other non-profit organizations that would be exempt from paying property taxe…

Anxiety About Homosexuality and Apocalyptic Worldview is An Old Marriage: 10 Questions for the Author of Visions of Sodom: Religion, Homoerotic Desire, and the End of the World in England

By H. G. Cocks

…sire, and the End of the World in England, c. 1550-1850? There is a great book by Paul Hallam called the Book of Sodom (Verso, 1995) which is an anthology of writing about Sodom and Gomorrah from the Bible to Proust and beyond which I have always really liked and I thought that this was great source material. Also I was puzzled by the question of why Protestant propagandists after the Reformation wrote so much about sodomy and sodomites. This is a…