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New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…er inappropriately compares children raised by two heterosexual parents for 18 years with children who experience family transitions — like foster care — or who live with single or divorced parents, or in blended families.” Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin gets right to the point about the study’s fatal ﬂaw: “The study compares the children of married biological parents with those from broken homes — and the study’s “lesbian mothers” that our o…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…OH, Bishop George Murry, won for the not terribly consequential post of chair of the Committee on Catholic Education. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput beat another Francis pick, Bridgeport, CT, Bishop Frank Caggiano, for chair of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, which is responsible for promoting the church’s teaching regarding hot-button issues like family and contraception (or the lack thereof). Msgr. J. Brian Bran…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…rmed groundbreaking research finding that: … gay and lesbian couples were fairer in their dealings with one another than straight couples, both in intent and in practice. The lesbians in the study were almost painfully egalitarian—in some cases putting money in jars and splitting everything down to the penny in a way, Schwartz says, that “would have driven me crazy.” Many unmarried heterosexual cohabitators were also careful about divvying things…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…roughout Europe, Ireland, and England understood the period around November 1 as not just a time to bring in the harvest, slaughter the livestock, and prepare for winter, but also to honor the dead—and most especially to ritually assist the souls who had died over the course of the year to move on to another world. With bonfires and sacrifices, feasting and divination, the Celts mingled with their recent dead but also understood the seasonal trans…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…amani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute, named after his wife who had died in 1973. The Institute, which functioned as the center for teacher training, greatly augmented the number of yoga teachers who received official training in Iyengar Yoga and became the headquarters from which to disseminate the Iyengar system. Today, there are thousands of Iyengar Yoga teachers and millions of practitioners in over seventy countries across the world. Some yo…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…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 formal religious doctrine. After all, no religious text prohibits adherents from providing contraception in a healthcare insurance plan for employees. As such, while Jewish pla…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…and brimstone preachers of science), the film manages to build a case that: 1) it is un-American to omit discussion of intelligent design from Science and the science classroom and 2) ‘belief’ in evolution logically leads to atheism and even the Holocaust. Yes, you read that correctly, the Holocaust. The movie gets so much wrong here—in the science, in the framing of the issues, even in over-dramatizing and misrepresenting the cases of the ruined…

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

By Anne Eggebroten

…lture of extreme secrecy has prevailed, codified in Vatican norms issued in 1962 requiring secret investigations and prohibiting any report to civil authorities. Will Pope Benedict XVI set in motion any change to canon law? Will he step down or ask any complicit bishops to resign? Will he even order a Church-wide investigation? Unlikely. Instead, his moral authority will continue to erode. The number of priests will continue to dwindle. Catholic w…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…big tent approach 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…