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Are Atheists Taking 1st Amendment Suits Too Far?

By Gordon Haber

…it also helps wealthy pastors line their own pockets. For example, between 1993 and 1995,Saddleback Church paid Rick Warren a housing allowance of around $80,000 per year, which (probably not coincidentally) was most of his salary. The IRS guideline, however, was that clergy can only claim “fair market value” of the home, and the rental value of the house in question was $60,000 a year. The IRS wanted Warren to cough up the taxes on the differenc…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…dian published satellite images of the mosque in a kind of grotesque before-and-after. The first image, from 2017, shows the mosque from above, casting an elongated shadow. The second image shows “a smooth patch of earth.” There’s a less radical but nevertheless disturbing story about China’s Kargilik Mosque. According to Radio Free Asia, the Chinese authorities stripped the 16th century building of its Islamic imagery and festooned it instead wit…

What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

By Susan Henking

…d if you want to check out some of the wonderful real-life-not-fantasy anti-Westboro picketing ever, click here and add them to your picketing, fantastical or real. In my fantasy, the family and friends of Devin Snyder understand those called to protest against Phelps in Cohocton as acting in ways consonant with the sergeant’s decision to join an Army and participate in a war with which some of those same protestors disagree. In my fantasy, they…

Pastor of Kentucky Church Severed From Baptists Over LGBT Inclusion: Not Activism, Just Honesty

By Mike Greer

…e church is preparing to host their first same-sex marriage next month. The 106-year-old Crescent Hill congregation is adjacent to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and before the fundamentalist takeover of the seminary in the early 1990s Crescent Hill was the spiritual home for many students, staff, and distinguished professors. Today the 800-member church is a diverse community of faith including people of various races, et…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…t “morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan,” lives in a “one of a kind,” 19-chimneyed mansion in the heart of Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood conservatively valued at $14.3 million. And he is waited on by three nuns who live in a nearby coach house—very Downton Abbey. • Seattle Archbishop James Sartain, who is currently in charge of making sure that the naughty nuns of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious don’t spend too much time wor…

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…e years, including: • Kenneth Copeland and his wife Gloria live in a 20,000-square-foot lake-front mansion near Fort Worth, TX. They regularly fly one or the other of their two expensive jets and other airplanes around the world, including regular trips to their multi-million chalet-style mansion in Steamboat Springs, Colo. • Tony Palmer, a former employee of Copeland, is ordained with the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches (CEEC), a smal…

Vatican Reverses Anti-Liberation Policies in Mexico

By Ruth Chojnacki and Jennifer Scheper Hughes

…I replaced as many as 86 of 100 Mexican bishops in two years alone, between 1997-1998. In the most famous case, the indigenous-identified bishop Arturo Lona Reyes of Tehuantepec refused to tender his resignation. The same year, 1997, saw the closing of two Mexican seminaries that seemed to be sympathetic to the Chiapas rebellion. The Mexican pattern of closing seminaries and replacing bishops was repeated throughout Latin America, as the Vatican d…

Catholic Church Ordained Women Before, Can Do it Again

By Phyllis Zagano

…ompleted work. As we were working on the manuscript, we located Vagaggini’s 1500-word requested intervention before the 1987 Synod on the Laity in Rome, also in Italian, which actually served as a précis of the longer essay. So we translated that, too. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Women were ordained as deacons and can be so ordained again. Is there anything you had to leave out? Actually, no. We worked very hard on the…

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…s. All those mundane moments that enable us to better situate ourselves vis-à-vis this thing out there called religion. Taylor does not appreciate the Leviathanism that is the most apt description of the world we are currently living in. This is the secular age with its endless horizon of pixels and pundits and calls to liberation and fullness and health to which we all inevitably race to bow down. To be clear, such Leviathanism does not merely si…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

…re he graduated from another Southern Baptist college in Missouri, and a 22-year-old aspiring minister from Philadelphia who quotes Proverbs, declares his love for God—and laments the recent breakup of his relationship with a boyfriend. They are all members or supporters of Soulforce, an organization that aims to change the hearts of those who use religion to justify discrimination against sexual minorities. Most of the 20-somethings in the crowd…