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Note to the New Pope: Half of the World’s Poor are Women

By Marian Ronan

…ed to about the problems the new pope will face: the sex abuse scandal, corruption at the Vatican Bank and throughout the Vatican administration, secularism in the West, reaching out to the burgeoning Church in the Global South. Good luck to him on all counts, I say. For me, though, the kicker, the “line in the sand,” as Archbishop Timothy Dolan would put it: the most important problem facing Pope Bergoglio is the Church’s benighted attitude towar…

God Dissolves into the Occupy Movement

By Nathan Schneider

…e of color get is that the cops are not our friends. But has the average protester who’s never come up against the “man” felt that? Does that moment of realizing you can’t trust the structures become a transcendent moment that re-orients someone, or does it just send you home? Time will tell….

Books to Give this Holiday Season to Help Understand the World We’ve Found Ourselves in (and to Help Reimagine a Better One)

By Becky Garrison

…for National Policy, whose membership list reads like a who’s who in the Trump administration. Shameless: A Sexual Reformation (Convergent Books) by Nadia Bolz-Weber For that holy hipster friend in search of a new kind of a/theistic Christianity who doesn’t want to go back and read the works of Phyllis Trible, John Boswell, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, bell hooks, and other pioneering scholars who’ve written on the intersection of human sexualit…

What Happens When We Use Horror Movies to Interpret the Real World? 10 Questions for the Authors of ‘The Exorcist Effect’

By Eric Harrelson and Joseph P. Laycock

…re’s also a point to it. “The Exorcist Effect” has contributed to some destructive outcomes that have ruined lives. The greatest of these was The Satanic Panic, a conspiracy theory that was rendered more plausible in the 1980s after cable television put films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen into heavy rotation. So we hope this book encourages readers to think about the power of media. We need to find ways to get the public to thin…

Jesus, Muslims, Mormons. And Missouri.

By Haroon Moghul

…ing from his more recent statements. Most recently, speaking on the Muslim world, we had Romney describe an abstracted “world of Islam,” which suggests that for him Islam is something like a theme park gone horribly wrong. What Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan say on these matters is of interest, if only because our relationships with the Muslim world matter, though perhaps not as much as our relationships to our fellow Americans—those we include, or ex…

A far-right protestor wears a MAGA tophat with a grim expression.

Conservative Evangelicals Aren’t Hypocrites, They’re Sadists

By Daniel Schultz

…an imperfect instrument of God’s work to maintain the sacred order of the world. The cruelty is indeed the point because the cruelty manifests the justice that maintains the proper order. So how do you counteract all of this? Arguments from reason don’t work—they’re working from a different mental model. Arguments from values don’t work—they don’t share the same values, or at least not in the same way. Arguments from identity don’t work—they don’…

In His ‘Forgiveness Day’ Sermon — a Slightly More Sophisticated ‘GloboHomo’ Rant — Kirill Lays Out an Authoritarian Vision in Which His Version of God Might Dominate and Rule the Human Race

By Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

…ue fascist—values, do see Russia as the defender of Christian values “in a world gone mad.” Post-Soviet Russia, the creation of both church and state as it were, a geopolitical, religiously attuned country, becomes a beacon of hope for the eschaton (meaning the divine plan for the end of the world); or as one of my digital interlocutors termed it: “a lode stone [sic] for the compass of my soul.” Kirill’s sermon reminds us that religion is a social…

A Long History of Blaming the Jews

By Gordon Haber

…ism represented “a state of pure submission to the demands of the material world, and measured humanity’s progress toward truth in terms of its distance from that state” (an idea that strongly echoes the “flesh versus spirit” dichotomy of Paul). But Hegel believed that Kant had fallen prey to “the Jewish principle of opposing thought to reality, reason to sense”—in effect, Judaizing. Schopenhauer was the most blatant in his conflation of Judaism a…

Will Mindfulness Change the World? Daniel Goleman Isn’t Sure

By Jay Michaelson

…e belief system is such that they can’t allow themselves to know what the truth is. I am trying to reach out to a younger generation, people who haven’t fossilized into a belief set like that. For example, one of the things I advocate is teaching systems awareness in schools, so kids will grow up with models where it’s a given rather than something you have to be convinced about. Are focus and mindfulness enough to change the culture, or do we nee…

Fr. John Dear, Dismissed from Jesuits: “It Is So Strange to Be Hated by So Many Church Leaders”

By Megan Sweas

…is it so important? JD: Nonviolence is the center of Christianity and all world religions. It is the most needed thing in the world. Mahatma Gandhi insisted it is possible, and Martin Luther King, Jr. said that if we don’t do it, we will destroy ourselves. This book is a very simple explanation of what nonviolence requires: first being nonviolent to yourself; then being nonviolent to all other human beings, all creatures, and all creation; third…