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American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

By Richard Flory

…ken a much more adversarial stance to LGBT acceptance. However, increasing numbers of evangelical churches are accepting LGBT individuals as members. This development is not without its opponents, however. Many evangelical organizations—most significantly colleges, universities and seminaries—are mobilizing to retain their “religious right” to discriminate against LGBT individuals. More than 30 evangelical higher education institutions have petiti…

Another Manufactured Outrage: Rep. Ilhan Omar Did Nothing Wrong in Listing Hamas, Israel, and U.S. Together

By Joshua Shanes

…anything positive or negative. Perhaps she said something truly wrong this time, perhaps it’s manufactured outrage, or perhaps it’s something in between. We all need to avoid the common fallacy of stretching to find any excuse to defend one’s “own side” no matter how implausible the interpretation, while stretching to find any excuse to convict the “other side,” even when the outrage seems manufactured or unfair. I know I can be as guilty of this…

The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…igher than the so-called external form of religion… That is why in ancient times, the greatest prophets were great musicians.” Members of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood in 1966. Photo by Herb Greene from the Grateful Dead Archive at UCSC. Used with the gracious permission of the photographer. The members of the Grateful Dead did not set out to be religious figures and they certainly do not view themselves that way…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…By studying vampires, we study ourselves. I am concerned that despite the best intention of many scholars, the term “new religious movement” (a label that has been applied to vampires) carries with it the subtext that a group is totally “other.” While it may be comforting to think that we are totally different from vampires, this is not the case. Rather, I see vampires as indicative of much broader changes in our society. Modernity has been a gra…

Loving Uganda to Death: The Global Reach of Far-Right Christian Hatred

By Peter Montgomery

…re sent to Uganda for a few months. They are having the adventure of a lifetime while serving orphans and preaching Jesus to people on the streets. But their missionary work and message comes with that clear threat of a lifetime in hell for nonbelievers. And their hearts appear hardened to the impact that their movement might be having on LGBT people in Uganda. The film follows one young missionary, Jesse Digges, and his wife Rachelle. At one poin…

Death With Dignity: Combatting Religious Opposition to Physician-Assisted Suicide

By Krista Kapralos

…t even the strictest of religious traditions have a tendency to shift with time, and as our culture changes. Like Niedzielski’s friends, people who claim intense faith and adherence to a certain doctrine may likely reconsider those beliefs as technology advances and its use becomes accepted in everyday life, Campbell said. Even if official church policies don’t change, churchgoers often do. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception hasn’t…

New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable. Among Catholics, that number jumps to 66%. Protestants still lag behind, but 41% say gay and lesbian relationships are moral. Resorting to pseudo-science is the last gasp of anti-gay groups and they will certainly tout this study, ﬂaws and all, as proof that same-sex couples make awful parents and raise terribly troubled kids. Again, it’s no shock – the religious right wing is always quick to tw…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…anasia), vocations and ongoing formation (shoring up the rapidly declining number of priests and nuns) and, of course, religious freedom (Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who arranged Kim Davis’ meeting with Pope Francis, received two standing ovations from the bishops.). Then the debate turned to the USCCB’s quadrennial “Faithful Citizenship” voting guide. The bishops had voted earlier to revise the 2007 edition prepared for the 2008 election, whic…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…d became readily available to the masses. The 1960s proved to be the ideal time for the global dissemination of yoga, since it witnessed the British-American counterculture and the lifting of immigration restrictions to much of Western Europe and the United States, resulting in an influx of Indian gurus ready and eager to deliver yoga to a counterculture grasping for something radically opposed to what they perceived as the puritanical, body-nega…