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Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…aw. Religious exemptions from abortion bans offer relief to only a limited number of individuals and can never be a comprehensive legal solution to the country’s reproductive health crisis. Nor should the right to control one’s body depend on proof of one’s religious commitments; reproductive freedom is a right that depends on one’s humanity, not one’s religious beliefs. That said, attacking the status quo incrementally proved to be a winning stra…

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…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…stitutions for youth will be stripped bare because of lawsuit payouts, and number of vocations, already low, will become even lower because of the stigma attached to being a priest. The test of Moral Credibility has been found wanting, and the handwriting is on the wall. Even the National Catholic Reporter’s editorial page has called for the Pope to provide answers. No doubt about it, this is perhaps the second biggest crisis in “Christendom,” out…

Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

By Paul Wallace

…at the same moment that the Pope was having his say with the UK’s radical non-believers, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, also in England, was busy talking about baptizing space aliens. Which, to me, sounded preposterous. But, after some contemplation, I’ve decided that it’s not preposterous after all. Last week, a new planet—Gliese 581g—was discovered orbiting a star a mere 20 light years away in the constellation Libra. This in itsel…

Holy Father, You’re Not Helping: The Problem with the Pope’s Plan to Consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

By Katherine Kelaidis

…l Chrissy Stroop’s gig, but it’s really not okay to make other people your non-consensual missionary project. And it’s nonsensical to try to convert a person—or a country—that’s already converted. Unless you don’t think they really are converted; and as we’ve already discussed, in light of the history of East-West Christian relations it’s easy to see this ritual as implying exactly that. And that’s ignoring the fact that consecrating Ukraine and R…

Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

By John W. Morehead

…ism must be evil is ignored; as is that fact that Halloween incorporates a number of elements and influences that have accrued during its journey through various cultures. In truth, some of these elements are Christian, like the feast of the dead that attempted to maintain communion with the saints, both living and deceased. The Roman Catholic Church continues to include this element in its festivities, and thus, as historian Ronald Hutton argues…

We Were Here Before September 11th

By Amina Wadud

…difference that President Obama’s father was Muslim, albeit a secular, and non-practicing Muslim, because Obama gets to make his own choice; and it was not Islam. So he can stop apologizing for that too. What I am still having a hard time fathoming is: why so many Americans still identify Islam as foreign? I mean, Christianity was imported with immigrant settlers and their next generations. Somehow it isn’t foreign, unless you are Native American,…

Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue

By Cody J. Sanders

…majority of LGBT people may avoid ever becoming the victim of a violence, none will be able to avoid the psychic terror that is visited upon LGBT people with each reminder that this world is one in which people are maimed and killed because of their sexual and gender identities. It is this psychic terror that makes life so difficult for many LGBT people. It is this psychic terror that does the heavy lifting of instrumental, systematic violence. I…

The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

By Peter Manseau

…in the media. Or perhaps not: Differences of approach aside, Time and Life nonetheless told Catholic stories with similar relationship to authority. The notion that a religious organization as large as the Catholic Church might naturally include internal dissent was for the most part beyond the newsweeklies’ narratives of Catholicism in America, at least through the first four decades of publication. Only with the shifting cultural sands of the 19…

This Year in Satanism

By Joseph Laycock

…wafers were eventually surrendered and the suit dropped. This arrangement stopped further discussion of whether the Catholic Church actually holds a legal claim to how its wafers are used. Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin blamed The Satanic Temple for Daniels’s black mass, declaring, “It is shocking and disgusting that a group of New York ‘satanists’ would travel all the way to Oklahoma to peddle their filth here.” Greaves stated that Daniels was no…