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The Trouble With Francis: Three Things That Worry Me

By Mary E. Hunt

…dinals. But on closer inspection, it is clear that women ought not to book tickets to Rome just yet. Juxtaposing “valued” and “clericalized” is odd at best, pernicious at worst. In a church in which ordained male clergy have jurisdiction— that is, authority to make decisions about things that matter—to claim that women who cannot be ordained are valued is a hard case to make. Valued for what and how? We have heard from Francis all about women’s su…

Community Organizing and Symbolic Electioneering

By Laura R. Olson

…n media events. Most major decisions about the composition of presidential tickets — and even policy platforms — are made well before the speaker hits the rostrum. The delegates serve a largely symbolic role, and the speakers’ real audience is the electorate at large, following (or so both political parties hope) convention coverage at home on television and the Internet. Thus, the rhetoric that emerges from presidential nominating conventions sho…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…ggerated statistic that counts all baptisms and births, but not the actual number of churchgoers), representatives of the religion—and representations of it—have managed to become fixtures in popular culture. I don’t have a complete explanation for this, but I would point first to the post-9/11 zeitgeist. In the last decade, there was a national and global debate about the place of religion in politics. Many looked to the American past to better u…

Presidential Pep Talks and the Religion of Fear: How did an Uncontroversial Speech Become a National Controversy?

By Eric Reitan

…d. And in response to the controversy and the barrage of outraged parental phone calls, many school systems decided it was safest not to air the speech at all. Others required that alternative activities be arranged for children whose parents refused to permit their kids to be subjected to an encouraging presidential pep talk. The evening after the talk, the local news station I was watching aired a report on the event, complete with footage of a…

As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort

By Robert P. Jones

…cently as 2008, white Christians comprised 54% of the population, but that number is 44% today. More immediately, this legislation lifts language directly from former President Trump’s executive order targeting CRT, which banned the use of so-called “divisive concepts” and introduced the white “discomfort” criteria. Biden repealed this executive order on his first day in office. The Florida bill, like the other bills, is part of a coordinated Fran…

Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him “Selfish”

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

…abwe, just as overlooked and beleaguered… Big companies have always sought cheaper labor, moving from North to South in the United States, looking for the hungriest, the most desperate, the least organized, the most exploitable. Press coverage of conditions in Apple’s factories in China has been anything but glowing. Yet when Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, says he’ll give his personal wealth to charities of his choice (many of them in Silicon Valley), he…

Behind the Inclusive-Sounding Ads of this $100 Million PR-Blitz-for-Jesus it’s the Same Old Conservative Christian Fantasy

By Chrissy Stroop

…tal plane—and who is, despite the release of yet another major documentary last year, almost certainly bigger than the Beatles. Despite all that, some conservative Christians are apparently one-hundred million dollars worth of concerned that the enduringly popular Mr. of Nazareth just isn’t doing it for some of the kids these days. Hence, the rebrand to make the ostensible son of God ‘cool’ and ‘relatable.’ The “He Gets Us” campaign is a project o…