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Prisoners In the Hands of an Angry God: A Conversation About Religion and Reform

By Andrew Aghapour and Stephanie Gaskill

…rated people by welcoming them into churches, while also believing that criminals don’t deserve any special government assistance. The simplistic way the survey questions are worded doesn’t provide any way to account for this kind of nuance. For your own research you’ve interviewed prisoners, wardens, and politicians about moral rehabilitation, which is the subject of a faith-based reform program at Louisiana’s Angola Prison. You must have a diffe…

New Research Links Spiritual-Not-Religious to Mental Disorder

By Elizabeth Drescher

…regants while excluding those further out on the margins than the mere unfamiliar newcomers, single people, those without children, and so on who are often given a less than hospitable welcome in many religious communities. It’s fair to assume, as well, that even religious groups truly desiring to embrace all comers may be off-putting to people already predisposed to or suffering from mental disorders. The “organization”—liturgical, ideological, s…

Obama Caves on (Another) Contraception Exemption

By Patricia Miller

…ew regulation didn’t broaden the exemption to the mandate to simply allow any employer to opt out without any kind of mechanism to ensure continuity of coverage for female employees. The bishops also claimed, by some kind of reverse-bishop-logic, that the move to broaden the exemption for some for-profit employers “would effectively reduce, rather than expand, the scope of religious freedom.” But by creating an exemption to the mandate in the firs…

Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

By Danny Fisher

…toward both pacifism and moral absolutism. At the same time, he wonders if military might could be right in some real-world scenarios. “It thus seems to me that the ethics of early Buddhism simply do not cover all the predicaments of the human situation,” he writes. “[In] circumstances where moral obligations run at crosscurrents… [I believe] we must simply do our best to navigate between them, rigorously examining our own motives and aspiring to…

The “Mormon Moment” Yields… Not So Much

By Joanna Brooks

…ffering a positive word like “good,” or “honest,” increased from 18% in 2011 to 24% in 2012. All of these gains were concentrated among Republicans voting for Romney, naturally. Still, the number one word survey participants associated with Mormons? “Cult.” And fully 27% of survey respondents still have no idea what religion Mitt Romney is….

White Evangelical Leaders Already Distancing Themselves from the “81-Percenters”

By Neil J. Young

…r of evangelicals” voted for Trump. Instead, news media, including the The New York Times, Washington Post and Fox News, to name a few, all made clear time and again that a majority of white evangelicals supported Trump. It’s true that in prior election cycles the media has not been good about distinguishing “evangelicals” from “white evangelicals”—a confusion that scholars of American religion often pointed out—but coverage of the 2016 election w…

Five Social Media Trends that are Reshaping Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…g hold across social media platforms. This has had no small appeal among many lay and ordained ministry leaders, who use LBS to make visible the range of their ministry practice and to alert community members that they’re available for conversation at a nearby coffee shop or brewpub. Jerry Whirtley, pastor of First English Evangelical Church in Victoria, Texas, sees LBS check-ins as digitally incarnational ministry: I check in everywhere I go… If…

If You Liked The Martian You’ll Love These 3 Sci-Fi Shorts

By Andrew Aghapour

…The Cubit. Without further ado, here are the top three short stories for anyone jonesing for more Weir: Bored World. The story of a mischievous, trans-dimensional plane of existence. Is this a god, or the story of sci-fi itself? Antihypoxiant. Here at The Cubit we’ve been tracking shifts in our cultural attitudes towards health, diet, and medicine. In “Antihypoxiant,” Weir pushes a fictional scientist to the limit of a certain kind of care. The E…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…ting between Hindus and Muslims threatened to destroy the region. Of the many new religious movements of the 1960s and ’70s, Peoples Temple is probably the only one that can boast an agenda that remains enormously relevant to us today. That its genesis was admirable makes the implosion of the dream that much more tragic. Following Fondakowski, who seems to know few details about Jonestown at the outset of the book, is to understand the way one per…

2017 Around the World: Progress and Persecution For LGBT People

By Peter Montgomery

…sharp critic of violations by Arab governments; a Muslim who condemned Islamic militants; and a Jordanian prince who discarded his title to take the job and become an advocate for victims. “Even more than his predecessors, Zeid fully embraced the role of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights as ‘conscience for the world,’ eloquently using his voice to become ‘a sort of nightmare’ for dictators, demagogues, and anti-democratic foes,” said Felice…