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World Vision Rescinds Decision to Employ LGBT Marrieds

By Elizabeth Drescher

…onservative Evangelical Christians. In a statement released yesterday, the World Vision president Richard Stearns followed the well-worn Evangelical tradition and offered a weepy apology to conservatives who were outraged by the earlier decision to allow compassion to trump conservative correctness in its employment policies: We are brokenhearted over the pain and confusion we have caused many of our friends, who saw this decision as a reversal of…

Pope Francis, the Bouncer

By Anthea Butler

…orming the Curia, and reforming the world are two very different things. (Truthfully, reforming the world might be an easier task.) Righting the Vatican is a enormous task. While Evangelii Gaudium is a good beginning, the more compelling action taken by the Vatican last week was the implementation of a task force for the protection of children. Suggested by the council of eight Cardinals the Pope has appointed, it remains to be seen whether or not…

Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

By Paula M. Cooey

…rciless, satirical attack on German philosopher Leibniz’s notion that this world is the best possible world that God could have created, given that God is, after all, both benevolent and all powerful. The central figure Candide, a naïf of the first order, challenges theodicy with the ironclad logic of a child as he proceeds through an adolescent life riddled by personal disaster. Given human suffering (particularly from natural disaster, and parti…

How Belief in Moscow as ‘The New Rome’ Explains Kirill’s Astonishing Declaration That ‘Russia Has Never Attacked Anyone’

By Katherine Kelaidis

…Romanians, like their Greek counterparts, the new Rome isn’t Moscow, but Brussels. Russian claims that the borders of nation-states—most of which are notably less than two-hundred years old—don’t have any significance, are dangerous claims for these kinds of Orthodox nations and people that are looking to modernize, and, ultimately, to Westernize. Americans, particularly Protestant ones, often scoff at the succession of Romes that still capture t…

The Potentially Explosive Russian Church Intrigue Revealed by Mueller Investigation

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ure of the story is not entirely relevant, because it points to a greater truth: That the Russian Church and the Russian state have resumed their marriage. This week the world learned that the Russian hackers implicated by the Mueller investigation didn’t just target Western governments and political parties, but also leading figures in the Orthodox Church. Top aides to Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (the “first-among-eq…

Why Virginia Governor’s ‘God is Everywhere’ Statement isn’t a Simple Answer to Those Who Want to Worship Together

By Karen E. Park

…tion which is shamanistic and animistic. In Hmong cosmology, the spiritual world and the material world are linked in complex ways, and the shaman works on behalf of the community to restore health, harmony, and to keep good relations with the ancestors (for an excellent documentary on a Hmong shaman from Appleton named Paja Thao see The Split Horn.) Hmong funerals, at which the entire community gathers to help the soul of the deceased person find…

The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain and Michelle Goldberg

…le with how yoga was being practiced. Now the class is back with a new instructor—a South Asian instructor—who worries she was hired only because she’s Indian. The incident was the latest in a string of cultural flashpoints surrounding the centuries-old Indian practice, and has made many a yogi rethink the lines between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation. In the following conversation, journalist Michelle Goldberg and professor Andrea Ja…

Doubting Obama: A Response to Harper’s and Simon Critchley

By Linell Cady

…t trajectory; it is not your “old-time religion” with claims to exclusive truth or absolute certitude; it is not a form of religion that positions itself against the secular world as its antagonist and antithesis. It is a form of religiosity that refuses the binary of religion and secularism which has privatized and depoliticized religion and set up a sharp opposition between faith and reason. It is a form of religiosity that draws more eclectical…

Peter Berger, Sociology’s Defender of God (1929-2017)

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…o provide. Again, religion was at the heart of Berger’s thinking about the world, including the global world of our 21st century era. In the lead essay for a book on Religion in Global Civil Society that I edited, Berger notes that “whether civil or uncivil, there can be no doubt that religion today is being globalized to an unprecedented degree” (p15). Trying to make sense of this new reality, like the many social realities that fascinated him ov…

Delillo and Doctor Strange: Orientalist Fantasy is Alive and Well

By Noah Berlatsky

…aracter say that she’s made out of words—when she is literally made out of words. The world of the book is nothing, which, in parallel, suggests that the world is nothing. And, in recognizing that with such deftness, DeLillo shows he’s really something. His virtuoso statement is that there is no statement. He is fixed in the canon because he knows that, like Artis, he is fixed in no place. But is it no place? What if Artis is made, not of words, b…