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Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…sus Christ” will get to heaven. (I’m not alone here, by the way; a growing number of evangelical Christians agree with me.) At the same time, the most moving and culturally important visions of heaven are those created by the conservative believers. These are the visions that move people to action: to be faithful to One God, for example, or to martyr themselves. I would like to believe in heaven as a concrete reality in the future, a place that re…

Why Don’t White People Show Up For Juneteenth The Way They Showed Up For George Floyd?

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…is that White people do not attend Juneteenth festivals in any appreciable numbers. This month I attended two Juneteenth festivals in the Columbia, South Carolina metropolitan area and the results were the same: minimum White attendance. Both events were free to the public, with ideal weather and plenty of good food and entertainment. Whereas a cross-section of Black America was in attendance, Whites stuck out like rice in chocolate pudding. But t…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…to judge and find wanting the ramblings of a dying institution whose complicity in its own demise is astounding. Protecting Doctrine, not Kids While other clerics are praising the Pope for his leadership at the CDF during the time these cases came through, it would do them well to remember that this issue has been before the church long before 2001. This was the year that these sexual abuse cases were turned over to the CDF for Church oversight, h…

55% of Utah Mormons Believe LGBT People can “Change”

By Joanna Brooks

…studied and understood. Any doctrine that would be used to exclude a good number of the earth’s people from full equality before the law and God should be very carefully examined. When it comes to gay issues, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding of what life is like for gay people or about the doctrinal reasons their LDS leaders say and do the things they do. In fact, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding about what their…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…ebate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews material given to him by Spiegel and her editor Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article…

From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

By Daniel Schultz

…“Yes, we will come through the coronavirus! Yes, we will come through the city quarantines,” he avowed. “Yes, we will come through an inept government that can’t handle a real crisis. Yes, we will come through an election season, in victory, I pray … Yes, we will come through all our troubles in hope.” Other Christians seem less pro-social, let us say. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, a Tampa Bay televangelist, equated changing habits in an effort to…

Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

By Daniel Schultz

…mpanion kept 95.7% of it.) It’s possible this is part of a larger trend. A number of paragraphs down there’s mention of a long-delayed vote on the future of the denomination, which might lend credibility to the headline, but no details are given, so it’s not possible to evaluate the claim. Likewise, near the top of the story comes a paragraph with a quote from an RCA pastor about the financial difficulties this will create. Does he speak for the d…

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…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…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 suffer endlessly forever and ever, amen—can be a great motivator for the true believer. It can motivate people to stop smoking, drinking, swearing, wearing their hair long…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…convened—whether in person at the Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City, or by internet, cable television, satellite broadcast, and radio—for the Church’s semi-annual General Conference. For Mormons, Conference means listening to a set of sermon-like addresses by Church leaders, not “conferring” in committee and deliberating policy, as is the case for other Protestant denominations. And although Church spokespeople stressed that Conference…