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Welcome to the “Spin-od”: Conservatives Look to Halt Reforms on Divorce and Other “Family Matters”

By Patricia Miller

…ds in Church history or else he is pretentiously self-confident: as though today suddenly such an ingenious theological insight had been discovered that it would open up a path that had been blocked for two thousand years. He knocks the proponents of change—most notably his German bishop colleagues—as “brimming with self-confidence, like men on a mission,” and says they “can be assured of the applause of the media,” but concludes that “any careful…

In Repudiation of its Devastating Doctrine of Discovery, Vatican Masks the History and Responsibility of Catholic Church

By Elisha Chi

…ch and state (i.e. the political and the religious) is a myth. This is as true for boarding schools, as it is during presidential elections. Just as it was true a few years ago, when the Philadelphia Archdiocese issued a letter to be read at each mass, urging parishioners to contact their political representatives to advocate against extending the statute of limitations on child sex abuse cases. This rhetoric of separation between the political an…

When Religious Disagreement Seems the Least of Our Problems: The Future for “Interfaith” in a Divided Society

By Michael Schulson

…ifference, rather than letting it unspool as part of a larger interplay of worldviews, would have struck me as faintly bizarre. Back then, conscious interfaith work seemed like an act of desperation—for people who simply could never escape being pigeonholed by their faith—or an act of indulgence—for people so accustomed to welcoming spaces that they could take the occasional vacation into tenser territory, especially when a warm-and-fuzzy outcome…

The Women’s March, Anti-Semitism, and ‘The Jewish Farrakhan’

By Shaul Magid

…rganizers. He was arrested by Belgian police and sent back to America. The international conference was held in the Palais des Congres in Brussels and was intended to give public voice to the plight of Soviet Jewry. Menachem Begin, soon to be Prime Minister of Israel, was the only one in the closed session who voted in favor of allowing Kahane to speak, accusing the organizers of an “un-Jewish act” in turning him over to the police. After Kahane w…

Religion as a Front for Tyranny: A Roundtable on the Timeliness of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

By Anita Little

…nd Leah. Janine/Ofwarren’s punishment for her insolence is justified by a gruesome interpretation of Matthew 5:29 (“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” [KJV]). Similarly, we see the selective use of biblical texts in real-world policymaking. For example, U.S. Rep. Jody Arrington of Texas supp…

Are Atheists The New Campus Crusaders?

By Katherine Don

…presentation entitled “The Unstoppable Secular Students” compared SSA to Cru. Cru takes in $500 million a year, while SSA takes in $998,000; Cru has three paid staff members per 1 campus group, while SSA has 78 campus groups per 1 adult organizer. And yet Cru is growing at a rate of 16 per cent while SSA is growing at a rate of 116 per cent. The presentation concludes: “Cru has a massively larger budget, the majority of the U.S. population to dra…

Merry Kitzmas! Marking An Evolutionary Victory

By Lauri Lebo

…a lot of people about the significance of evolution and how it got us here today. More importantly, it seems to have engaged the science education community to develop ways to address the teaching of evolution more directly. Today, evolution education has gained prominence with a host of new teaching programs. Certainly in the case of Dover, teachers in the school district there were timid about teaching the subject, fearing it would offend the Ch…

The Divorce Rate Is Falling. Shouldn’t That Mean the Sky Isn’t?

By Sarah Posner

…ge is more stable because people are again marrying people suitable to the world in which we live. “It’s just love now,” Mr. Wolfers said. “We marry to find our soul mate, rather than a good homemaker or a good earner.” Of course, people still get divorced, and they still stay in unhappy marriages, in some instances owing to economic factors. But the notion that easier access to divorce has continued to cause half (or close to it) of all marriages…

A Neoconservative Jesus, Certified Kosher

By Ira Chernus

…bbi with few scholarly credentials and limited credibility in the academic world, who argues that the most valuable way to interpret Jesus today is to see him as an Orthodox rabbi in a fully Orthodox Jewish context. It’s no surprise how often scholars and non-scholars alike end up saying, in effect, “Hey, Jesus was an awful lot like me!” Jesus Could Not Have Studied Talmud One proof that Jesus was a full-fledged rabbi, according to Boteach, is his…

Martin Luther King: Libertarian and Anti-Abortion Social Conservative

By Paul Harvey

…mmunity, civil rights, and religion sound quite unlike those who quote him today but opposed him then (or would have if they were alive). The struggle continues to keep King’s drive for economic justice alive, beyond just “civil rights.” We have some good places to start to reflect on that struggle. Albert Raboteau reminds us of the ancient Christian traditions that feed King’s emphasis on the poor and disfranchised. Historian Barbara Ransby expla…