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Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…through their manipulative readings of scriptures and history. One of the most egregious and best-documented examples is, of course, the behavior of German Christians during the Third Reich. Pope Benedict could gain the respect of world opinion by acknowledging what historians have amply demonstrated: that well-intentioned, pious Christians—and not just atheists—committed heinous acts. Christian teachings are no guarantee against atrocity and, in…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…ual at all, rather the structures that cause certain people to fail with almo*]}*st no fault of their own. And yet, without this data, they will very quickly ascribe the mistake to themselves.” In the case of this subway step, it would be inaccurate to solely blame each individual for tripping. Only by observing the aggregate can we see how a social structure—here, the design of a stairwell—is a more powerful cause of what seem like individual errors.…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…pel” that speaks only to “conquerors”—like, say, Beck’s version—leaves out most of humanity. Some may object that black theology, by its very name, leaves out white people, but that too is a misconception. Cone has been talking to white people about black theology for over forty years now. Its call to repentance is for us. Of course, it would feel better if he skipped that part and went straight to grace and salvation, as Beck tries to do but, aga…

Rolling the Stone Away: LGBTQI Elders Meet the Next Generation of Christian Activists at a Watershed Conference

By Mary E. Hunt

…the gathering. Once the dance music started in the plenary hall, even the most seasoned folks showed they still had their moves. People came from the earliest days in 1964 when ministers and homosexual activists (yes, that is how they were described then) founded the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in San Francisco. Well before Stonewall, pastors there took on the police and city officials for their discriminatory behavior toward lesbian,…

Louis CK Asks on SNL: “How Could We Not Have a [Divine] Mother?”

By Holly Welker

…we not have a mother? Heavenly Mother is an absolutely foundational bit of Mormon doctrine that is very rarely discussed—in fact, worshiping her can get you excommunicated. Some Mormons think we aren’t even supposed to talk about her, but her existence in Mormon theology is at least acknowledged in the recent essay about whether we’ll get to have our own planets in the next life. One source Mormons rely on to establish God the Mother’s doctrinal r…

‘Culting’: From Waco to Fundamentalist Mormons

By Catherine Wessinger

…group, an offshoot ultimately of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. In 1993 most of the Branch Davidians were residing in a single large residence on property called Mount Carmel about ten miles outside Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians believed that their prophet, David Koresh (age 33 in 1993), was the Endtime messiah. Koresh taught that members of the community would be killed in an attack by agents of “Babylon,” a symbol in the book of Revelatio…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…oke to our consumerism. Oddly, I came to find the clearest answer to my quest to understand our current culture of shopping in the fourth century. Augustine of Hippo, in his poetically written spiritual autobiography, The Confessions, struggles with misguided desire in his long and arduous path to Christianity. As I searched for a theological category to come to terms with our context, the word concupiscence leapt out at me. A theme that emerges i…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…d, create just the right sort of controversy to really drive ticket sales. Most evangelical movies, though, have done only well enough to convince others that it’s possible, even if the formula for success hasn’t quite been perfected yet. If they’re not smash hits, faith films haven’t all been complete commercial misses either. The first installment of The Chronicles of Narnia brought a big profit for Walt Disney and Walden Media—around $750 milli…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…sudsy hands and slippery dishes I could just let God go, then it seemed—almo*]}*st inevitably—that I’d never really believed in Him, anyway. So what happened after I renounced Allah? There was that sense that I’d perhaps never believed. There was, of course, the awkward flinch. The waiting, looking behind my back and all around me, with the faucet still at full blast while I listened to the sound of a world absent of divinity. There was even some dis…

Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

By Sarah Posner

…when enacting the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). What was most striking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fired the most challenging questions at the companies’ lawyer, Paul Clement, confronting the essential underpinnings of his clients’ claims. In particular, they questioned whether RFRA was intended to cover corporations, whether a party can claim a religious exem…