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Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…t in 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 wit…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…ndomly, depending on the history of the city. Burkhard Bilger, in a recent New Yorker profile of neuroscientist David Eagleman, describes this transition in our understanding of how the brain keeps time. During the mid-nineteenth century, the prevailing theory was that there was a single, integrated time-keeper somewhere in the brain—the equivalent of a neurological stop watch. More recent studies, however, suggest a hodgepodge of overlapping syst…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…ed being guided by religious obligations to oneself. A seminary student in New York explained that her abortion was inspired by her belief that “if it is not the right time or the right circumstance to have a baby, a pregnant person has the inherent spiritual authority not to call that particular future into being. Religious freedom law protects religious practices regardless of whether they’re mandatory in any religious tradition or derive from f…

Aasif Mandvi on Islamophobia, Acting, and the Long Shadow of Jon Stewart

By Haroon Moghul

…issue I thought I could lend my voice to in a satirical space. Were there any particular misconceptions or fears you wanted to address? There was a lot of stuff about Shari’ah Law, the protests against the mosques, the standard stuff—the stories that kept coming up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJQr1Go9ldw&t=2s You work as an actor, a writer, a comedian, in a lot of creative spaces. What’s the line between free speech and bigotry? Wow. What is…

Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

By Jhas Williams

…and class. To people of color who have spent centuries being shunned or diminished by white evangelicals, anything less than acknowledgment, and changed behavior, specifically from Bible-toting white men who’ve manipulated scriptural teachings in order to keep Black people in both literal and proverbial chains, will be as fake as it is antagonistic. The acknowledgment that Black lives matter must be more than a moment in history, not a marketing…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…cs and in their personal professions of faith. In the second decade of the new millennium, religious music has taken on a level of sophistication once reserved exclusively for the conflicted devout. Just ten years ago this wasn’t so. The George W. Bush administration, in which millennials came of age, was reigned over by a simple, angry deity who made one-dimensional characterizations of God more readily available than complex ones. The God-Rock g…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

Mitt Romney’s delusional 2012 pollsters got nothing on apologists for last week’s Pew Poll that found no real “Francis effect” from the pope’s first year. According to Daniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to fin…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…to coverage of American ir/a/religion. But do the Gallup numbers point to new ways we might be thinking about business as usual? Two findings are striking. First: Gallup reported that although Americans felt religion’s influence was declining, many—75 percent—agreed that more religion would be positive for the country. Not surprisingly, churchgoers were most gung-ho about religion’s beneficial impact. But “over half of those who seldom or never a…

What Do ‘The Christians’ Believe? Easter Reflections from a Non-Christian

By Gary Laderman

…ntensified debates over undocumented immigrants. On the Protestant side, many denominations that were composed primarily of Anglo-Europeans, like Methodists in the nineteenth century, are confronting the rise of ethnic congregations such as the Korean Methodist Church. This internal diversification of Christianity in America is more than just the multiplication of churches; it is a symptom of larger globalizing forces and processes that will trans…

An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

By Anne Eggebroten

…rch history,” declares the National Catholic Reporter in an editorial. The New York Times, which broke the story of abuse at the deaf school in Wisconsin, quotes a priest in Berlin as saying the crisis is “the worst in 100 years or more.” They Act Like They Don’t Believe in God It’s not that the faithful are leaving the Church—for the most part, they aren’t. It’s that the hierarchy itself is cracking. “What I would like to see is actually Christia…