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Conservative Christians Insist the Toxic Theology Portrayed in the Duggar Family Doc is ‘Fringe’ — But is it Really All That Different?

By Caroline Matas

…mer presidential candidates? Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets hit Amazon Prime on June 1 and quickly became the most popular content on the platform according to Story Force, the production team whose past exposés include Amazon Prime’s LuLaRich and the 2015 Oscar-winning film Spotlight. The four-episode series details the meteoric rise to prominence of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their nineteen children, whose series of Discovery and…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…avor of sexual identity. But, after years of studying and writing about reparative therapy and the ex-gay movement, and after reading Rich Wyler’s own account of his sexual conversion, I found NPR’s story, and Schumacher-Matos’ defense of it, shallow and dispiriting. Married with Children There is much to criticize in the story, and much to attend to in the responses to it. Warren Throckmorton, Candace Chellew-Hodge, and Joanna Brooks have all rai…

Mormon Women Knock at the Door, Are Turned Away

By Holly Welker

…er 5, 2013, almost 200 Mormon women gathered in downtown Salt Lake City on a sunny but crisp Saturday afternoon in order to seek admission to the priesthood session of the semi-annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Calling itself Ordain Women, the group had already requested and been denied tickets to Saturday evening’s male-only priesthood session. Nonetheless the women and their allies walked to the Tabern…

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

By Sunnivie Brydum

…Saturday’s planned “Unite the Right” rally. On Saturday, Henderson-Espinoza and Rev. Traci Blackmon were outside Emancipation Park offering prayerful presence and witness when neo-Nazis, fascists, and unhooded Ku Klux Klan members descended on the intersection, unleashing violence that caused the security detail protecting Blackmon and Henderson-Espinoza to literally yank Rev. Blackmon off-camera during a live interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid. (Vi…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…ne affair, attentive Conference observers noticed signs that the Church is aware of what the media has called “the Mormon Moment:” an intensity of public attention driven largely by the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Political watchers’ ears pricked up on Saturday afternoon when J. Willard Marriott and Jon Huntsman Sr. were among a group of LDS Church officials “released” from their callings. With both men being the namesa…

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

By Paul Wallace

…ation or function of the brain, it must not be real. The article points to a number of ways neuropsychology has been overinterpreted and oversold. Rosenbaum addresses the fetishizing of fMRI images, the ideology that conflates causation and correlation, and the shifting semantics — evil recast as “non-empathy” by one esteemed psychologist (echoing, interestingly, the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation). But it’s the image o…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…sly healed by touching the garment of the latest faith healer and saying “Baaay-bee!” Religion can also motivate people to kill others like abortion doctors, gays and lesbians, and transgender people all in the name of their god. The single greatest motivator for these 98 subjects however most certainly was a fear-based one. In short, they were all living under the threat of hell. The thought of eternal damnation—a true, fiery pit where you suffe…

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

By Ed Simon

…idences the latter’s piety. Ironically, it was Columba’s grandfather, the pagan king Nial, who was responsible for Patrick’s kidnapping, the event which began the saint’s ministry in Ireland. Now, both Patrick and Columba are among the dozen canonized Disciples of Ireland, though beyond even that honorific, both are remembered as exemplars of “Celtic Christianity,” a version of the faith drawn towards the natural, the mystical, the eternal. Medita…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…thing for it to be a trend. Wait. What’s this? From Ina May Gaskin, earth-mama midwife and not-Roman-Catholic hippie commune cofounder, in an excerpt from her March 2011 book, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta: [P]regnancy is not an illness in need of treatment, and nature’s design of women is not considered flawed. (emphasis mine, again. I am very emphatic.) And we have a meme! But let’s consider this claim more closely. I don’t mean for this…

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

By Jeremy Biles

…o. What does this mysterious sculpture depict? Popular answers include: an aardvark, a bird, an Afghan hound, and one of Picasso’s lovers. But to my eyes, it looks like a sphinx—a monster that (like the anamorphic skull haunting Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors) only snaps into focus when viewed from an oblique perspective. To perceive the recumbent sphinx you have to approach the piece not from the front, but from behind and to the…