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Opting for Lucy Over Linus: Watching The Great Pumpkin in the Age of Trump

By Jonathan Malesic

…stories. It asks not just about faith and doubt, but also about how we can manage to live with people we think are dangerously wrong about important matters. For political liberals like me, it’s about the challenge of loving the blockheads all around us. In previous years, I sympathized with Linus’s earnest, countercultural faith in the Great Pumpkin, a benevolent, all-knowing gourd he hopes to meet on Halloween night. While the rest of the Peanut…

Why Are We Drawn to Horror?

By Mathias Clasen

…m, tell them about the exciting stuff I’ve discovered in my research. If I manage to occasionally entertain them, that’s great, but I didn’t set out to do that. I do hope my enthusiasm for the subject carries across, though. I imagine some readers might be pissed off by some of my claims, or because I left out their favorite horror writer or director or whatever. But that’s life in the big city. I’m hoping most readers will approach the book with…

When You Argue With a Fundamentalist You Don’t Know What You’re Asking For

By Nelle Smith

…thing: it was the dissolution of a world. People who didn’t grow up in the American evangelical bubble often don’t realize what they’re demanding when they ask an evangelical to accept a fact that is contradicted by their church’s interpretation of the Bible. To those bought in—excepting, perhaps, that small demographic of Christians who identify as evangelical and are truly progressive—evangelicalism is not a collection of facts. It is an entire…

The Convergence of Passover and Easter Can Leaven (or Unleaven) the Interfaith Family’s Holiday

By Samira K. Mehta

…holiday that brought real danger to Jewish communities. Even today, in the American context, Protestant and Catholic Easter liturgy can reflect that history, though there are also many moves to address the anti-Semitism inherent in the texts. Similarly, even churches that want to celebrate Jesus’s Judaism and note that the Last Supper was a seder have a complicated relationship to Judaism. Hosting a seder to mark Maundy Thursday is an endlessly co…

Exclusive: Columnist Jonathan Merritt on his Sudden Departure From Religion News Service

By Kaya Oakes

…le character and an editor in chief who by all accounts has no idea how to manage a team.” Asked what he plans next, Merritt says that given the disarray at RNS, “perhaps it’s time for a new religion news outlet.” There are “plenty of competent religion writers” who could work for “an organization built for the 21st century.” For now, Merritt says, he is “thinking very seriously about whether that needs to happen and whether I need to be one of th…

Jesus, Gentrification, and the Hypocrisy of “Diversity”: An Interview with D.L. Mayfield

By Kaya Oakes

…tholic missions in California, where I grew up, and where scores of Native Americans died due to the missionary efforts of the recently canonized Junipero Serra, among others. More recently, Catholic missionary efforts have focused more on providing food and medical aid in countries like South Sudan, where few secular NGOs have been willing to go. And recent discussions of Tim Kaine’s work in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps have lead to further confusi…

SCOTUS Seems to Think You Should Be Forced to Pay For Religious Education

By John Stoehr

…y sharia law. How are they going to distinguish? Not honestly, but they’ll manage. Are we talking about compelling states to fund religious schools and their religious activity but only the right kinds of religions? First comes the shift in free exercise law, which compels everyone—including the secular—to give money not just to schools with religious status, but for religious uses. That line between religious “status” and religious “use”—that gov…

The Battle for the Meaning of Religious Freedom Day

By Frederick Clarkson

…organizations as the Family Research Council, Family Policy Alliance, and American Family Association, and that it was “founded in 1991 to help public schools teach about the important contribution the Bible and Christianity make to the world.” Gateways has also jointly sponsored Religious Freedom Sunday (this year, January 13) with the Christian right legal network, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Every president since 1993 has issued the annu…

When Fundamentalism Follows You Out the Door: Transphobic Statement Exposes Exvangelical Trauma

By Chrissy Stroop

…g as progressive Christianity, a hot take that, many noted, erased African American and Latinx liberation theologies. While the line between a valid call-out and toxic cancel culture may not be a perfectly bright one, Finch quickly showed a willingness to listen and learn but was nevertheless “canceled” by many. She certainly did not deserve the barrage of harsh criticism that carried on for days. This brings us to a bizarre episode featuring the…

How Ancient Rabbis Can Help Combat STI Stigma

By Rebecca Epstein-Levi

…l and harmful, because the more we stigmatize, the less we can effectively manage and treat STIs. And that hurts people. With more serious infections, like syphilis and HIV, it can kill people. Where is the moral wrong, then: in having contracted the infection, or in creating a culture that impedes people’s ability to get treated? To be sure, the rabbis weren’t perfect, and their model doesn’t solve every problem with STI stigma. They were a patri…