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LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…lude churches like the Disciples of Christ), generating its own additional books of scripture, a distinctive notion of Christian perfection (or “sanctification,” to use the theological term) centered in LDS temple worship, and a history of distinctive social practices. But that innovation should not obscure the fact that a belief in Jesus Christ as savior is at the core of Mormon worship. Every Sunday, we take a bread-and-water sacrament in rememb…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…question is twofold: “What do scientists say, when they are handed a microphone and placed on a lighted stage in the public square? And how does that compare with what one might find in the scientific journals?” This question may be more difficult than the first, but it’s more urgent. Because it often happens that scientists, like so many priests and other religious leaders, use their hard-earned authority unwisely. They go just a little outside…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ouse, and his colleague, Rob Tisinai, gives a better breakdown of what the numbers really mean—and it isn’t a rousing success story about “change.” “Out of 98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexual feelings or become a bit more bi. And possibly none who turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do n…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…han reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any number of manifestations, from a community like Iona to the shelves of New Age bookstores. Bradley argues that although the idea of a historical Celtic Church may be an exercise in “wishful thinking, romantic nostalgia and the projection of all kinds of dreams about what should and might be,” it’s also a “vehicle through which people have chased their dreams… of deeper spir…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…tive interpretation. Multiply ambiguous, it is a strange concoction of any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply what the Chicag…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…a library in a small midwestern town when I was researching my forthcoming book on ex-gay ministries and Christian weight loss programs. Thoughtful and honest, he told me about his 20-year experience in a fundamentalist church and the affair he had with another man the whole time. Frustrated with the church’s theological narrow-mindedness and the many contradictions of the relationship, he broke off from both to join an evangelical church with an…

Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

By Sarah Posner

…ople who aren’t associated with the Christian right. Ten is a pretty small number to best represent a movement Newsweek describes as “changing and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal sch…

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…

Dispatch from Charlottesville: “It Was a War Zone. It Felt Like There Were a Million Nazis.”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…other thing is, this is a personal plea to white clergy—we didn’t have the numbers. White clergy did not respond to this. https://www.facebook.com/publictheologian/photos/a.832371280191875.1073741829.832236016872068/1364676620294669/?type=3&theater What does that feel like for you, as a trans queer Latinx, who is also public theologian and activist working in these spheres? What does that absence from white clergy signal to you and others who hold…

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

By Varun Soni

…the Grateful Dead collectively formed an intentionally itinerant community numbering in the tens of thousands, with their own customs, vernacular, art, and economy. In his explanation of the lure of the Grateful Dead to thousands of Deadheads around the country, Garcia ruminated, “maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.” Indeed, the promise of a great American adventure animated Deadheads to undertake an annual pilgrimage across th…