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Religious Exceptions Not So Exceptional According to New Study

By Patricia Miller

…s new analysis of employer health benefits plans? Kaiser found in fact that 10 percent of nonprofits with more than 1,000 employees have requested an accommodation to the contraceptive mandate, as did five percent of firms with between 200 and 999 employees. According to Kaiser, “many of the nonprofits who have sought the accommodation are likely health systems or educational institutions affiliated with the Catholic Church, which objects to birth…

Why Faith Needs Redemptive Struggle to Be Meaningful

By Liz Theoharis

…e together to build a powerful movement. He summons us to resist the divide-and-conquer strategy of the Pharoahs of our day, uniting to transform society for the benefit of all. Rev. Barber consistently emphasizes the sacredness of all life. He maintains that if we care about one death at the hands of a cop, then we have to care just as much about 2,800 deaths occurring each year due to lack of Medicaid expansion in North Carolina. He cautions us…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…ieve in the potential for God to radically change a person’s life. The once-I-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found narrative in Pentecostalism really resonates with inmates. That’s when I decided to focus my research on Pentecostalism, not just religion inside prison. Once you had that preparation under your belt, how did you come to choose the prison in Rio de Janeiro for your work? I found the prison through Rio de Paz, a human right group led by a local…

The Kids are Religious Right: Punk Rock & Pro-Life

By Justin Philpot

…s, nightly news programs, and the now ubiquitous blogosphere engage the pro-choice/pro-life rhetoric of candidates and their surrogates, taking great care to illustrate the necessity of either stance depending on a particular presidential hopeful’s base. Since the 1970s, right of center Republicans have relied on the grassroots organizing power of evangelical Christians—functionally synonymous within the media as the “religious right”—to propel th…

Racialization Meets Purity Culture: Abortion Criminalization Cases Confirm That It’s Always Been About Controlling Women’s Bodies And Protecting the ‘Ideal’ American Family

By Mihee Kim-Kort

…n NBC News report by Jennifer Chowdhury, “in 2011, Bei Bei Shuai, a Chinese-American woman, was held in prison for a year before feticide charges against her were dropped as part of a plea deal. Shuai was reportedly suffering from depression and tried to commit suicide while pregnant. She survived, but the fetus did not.” Said South Asian American activist Deepa Iyer: “Instead of receiving the medical support and counseling she so desperately need…

How Religion Shaped American Jewish Masculinity

By Sarah Imhoff

…k has chapters about American Jewish philosophy, religious conversion, the American west, Jewish identification with “Indians,” agricultural schools, Zionism, crime in New York, the Leo Frank case, and the Leopold and Loeb hearing. It would have been great to write chapters about sports, or about World War I, or about philanthropy, or about film. Or about ten or twelve more things I can think of. But there was no way I could cover every aspect of…

Touched by a Michael Landon: America’s Jewish Angel

By Peter Manseau

…n the Prairie (based on the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder) the 19th-century town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota hosts an unlikely guest: an elderly Jewish carpenter whose specialty is building coffins without nails. Among the most popular episodes of the long-running series, “The Craftsman” tells the story of Mr. Singerman, an Eastern European immigrant who takes on as his apprentice the adopted son of the Ingalls family (played by Matthe…

Godly Game or Godless Satire? Countering Biblical Ignorance with Heretical Humor

By Betsy Shirley

…e care,” “An endless stream of diarrhea,” or “A defective condom” with fill-in-the-blank statements like “I got 99 problems but ________ ain’t one,” A Game for Good Christians, released earlier this year, offers a scriptural twist: most of the material from its 300-card deck has been lifted directly from the Bible, with chapter and verse to prove it. The results fall somewhere between playful irreverence and flat-out blasphemy. For example, if the…

Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…be the European front in the new Cold War, and a three-year civil war, from 1946-1949, further decimated the country. The country opted for tourism in the 1960s, arguably the least “trickle-down” of all economic forms, and thus made itself further dependent upon and vulnerable to European whims. The U.S.-supported military junta was not expelled until 1974. And so on.) How to Sue a Monastery Into that atmosphere—one part boom town, and one part W…

Romney Goes to Bat Against Reid in Nevada

By Joanna Brooks

…ion jobs, more than doubling the state’s population. Now, those speculation-and-spending fueled good times are gone. That volatility does not treat mild-mannered Mormon politicians well: be they Reids, or Romneys. Just last week, Jan Shipps, a longtime scholar and canny observer of Mormon experience, wagered that Angle would beat Romney if he were on the ticket. I think she’s right. What’s happening in Nevada is the ugly down side of a speculation…