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Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course n…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…raeger, release date: May 30, 2009). What inspired you to write Vampires Today? What sparked your interest? Some people think I study vampires simply because they are unusual. I’ve even been asked if I am a vampire myself. The reality is that I became interested in the vampire community when I learned of a massive survey being conducted by the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (AVA). Their project was relevant to the sociology of knowledge: instead of defi…

Loving Uganda to Death: The Global Reach of Far-Right Christian Hatred

By Peter Montgomery

…of their words and deeds is a major goal for director Williams. In recent weeks he has screened the film at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and in New York.* At Fuller, he says, people were sharply critical of IHOP’s training and missionary style. The people at IHOP, he said, are planning to release a statement in response to the film. While he knows the people running IHOP are not going to change their view of the Bible, Williams hopes t…

Death With Dignity: Combatting Religious Opposition to Physician-Assisted Suicide

By Krista Kapralos

…those beliefs as technology advances and its use becomes accepted in everyday life, Campbell said. Even if official church policies don’t change, churchgoers often do. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception hasn’t changed, but Catholics in the United States use birth control and have abortions at about the same rate as non-religious people, Campbell said. And he explained that in the dozen years physician-assisted death has been legal…

New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…mple of prospective lesbian mothers was even more unrealistic than it is today.” The researcher for the new study, Mark Regnerus, isn’t free from his own bias, however. As Freedom to Marry points out in a press release on the study, Regnerus, ”is well known for his ultra-conservative ideology and the paper was funded by the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation – two groups commonly known for their support of conservative causes. The W…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ose marriage equality on religious grounds. For them, I point to a growing number of religious leaders who also understand that gays and lesbians can do a lot to “redefine” marriage in beneficial ways. Rev. Ed Bacon, who leads the 4,000 member All Saints Church in Pasadena, Calif., told Oprah Winfrey this past weekend that marriage would be “enriched” by same-sex couples. I’ve never had a straight couple come to me and say, ‘My marriage is in trou…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…hich functioned as the center for teacher training, greatly augmented the number of yoga teachers who received official training in Iyengar Yoga and became the headquarters from which to disseminate the Iyengar system. Today, there are thousands of Iyengar Yoga teachers and millions of practitioners in over seventy countries across the world. Some yoga advocates and pop culture critics have suggested that popularized yoga reflects only the impuls…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…e bit of turf to hold in an unsustainable legal and political fight. Every day, I read news stories from across the country about Mormons. And let me tell you, this movie alone has gotten ten times more coverage than the Church’s incredible humanitarian efforts in Haiti and the greening of its chapels combined. Perhaps it is because the leveraging of Mormon “grassroots” participation created an environment of double-talk and secrecy that hearken…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…an, though even their blasphemies came up short. Marilyn Manson scared the daylights out of children and parents alike in his 1990s heyday, but his most controversial album, Antichrist Superstar, was little more than a play on words of a harmless and beloved musical. Even the reliably contrarian Slayer could come up with an album title no more nuanced or threatening to the establishment than God Hates Us All for their early twenty-first century re…