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Gay, Christian, Pagan, Artist: How Matt Morris Defies the Borders of Spiritual Identity

By Jesse James DeConto

…that the Beatitudes should be engraved in stone on our courthouses, not the 10 Commandments. I think that if we lived into that, we would reshape the world in the image of love. After your reconversion to Christianity, you went silent for a couple of years. Why? Toward the end of Bishop in the Grove, I found that I didn’t want to process my own conversion experience and my story publicly any more. I didn’t want to process it with everybody. I didn…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…the church had ordained the first African-American protestant minister; in 1853 ordained the first woman as clergy since New Testament times; and in 1972 ordained the first openly gay person. So it was no surprise that when marriage equality overcame the last legal hurdle in Arizona, Dorhauer found himself standing in that tradition with other progressive clergy outside the Maricopa County Courthouse holding a sign stating: “We stand ready to mar…

“What Kind of Islam Is That?”: Talking With Refugees From ISIS

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…and Kurdistan. The pharmacist showed me a video he had made with his cell phone, which did indeed look like a cattle surge of vehicles illumined by a few eerie lights. Now the news from his town is “very bad”—there is no water or electricity or food in stores. Christians are forced to make payments to be allowed to survive and have to pretend to be Muslims and go to the mosque, and ISIS militants roam around the streets and do whatever they want….

The Only Religion Question Reporters and Debate Moderators Should Ask Presidential Candidates (Kim Davis Edition)

By Sarah Posner

…for shying away from hot-button religious culture war battles, “visited by phone” with Rowan County, Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis yesterday, according to a statement issued by his campaign. “I let her know how proud I am of her for not abandoning her religious convictions and standing strong for religious liberty,” the former pastor, Arkansas governor, and now two-time presidential candidate said in a statement. Arguing that “the Supreme Court c…

The Fragility of Our Reality: A Conversation with the Brain Behind PBS Miniseries on Neuroscience

By Michael Schulson

…, to a large extent, unmapped: the terra incognita in our skulls. Over the phone, Eagleman spoke with The Cubit about traumatic brain injuries, the idea of possibilianism, and the language we use to describe our brains. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. In The Brain, you do a good job of depicting the fragility of our experience of reality. Am I right to be a little scared by this instability? [Laughs] Well, you know, it’s one…

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ability to tell stories. He doesn’t have to explain that. Then, by the year 150 or thereabouts, there were so few Jews left in the Christian church that Marcion wanted to remove any semblance of Judaism from the Christian scripture. The church officially resisted that, but unofficially they became quite anti-Semitic. What happens then, you have an audience of only Gentiles reading these Jewish stories and because they don’t understand the storytel…

“We Blew it” on Climate Change, But May Survive Anyway: An RD Discussion with the First Transhumanist Candidate

By Andrew Aghapour

…n’t. I’ll check it out. It argues that, given the fact that the universe is 14 billion years old, and that there are 2 billion habitable planets, it would be incredibly amazing if we were the only advanced life form. In fact, it’s totally impossible from a statistical point of view that we would be the only ones. There are probably thousands and thousands of other life forms far more advanced than us in the universe just given the sheer numbers. G…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…ve. Thousands of veterans came home with severe combat stress. But “between 1968 and 1980 no official diagnosis for stress disorders was available,” Andreasen writes. PTSD entered the lexicon with the 1980 publication of DSM-III. If we imagine the range of human experiences as a landscape, then the creation of a diagnosis is bit like a incorporating a city. It does not create the houses or the people who live there, but it gives them boundaries wi…

Refusing Religion, Claiming the Future: A Roundtable Discussion on “The Nones Are Alright”

By Peter Laarman

…to the Pew Research Center’s 2007 and 2012 reports, black millennials ages 18-29 comprise 20% of historically black churches. This number is roughly comparable to that of the baby boomer generation. Thus, religious affiliation for young black adults does not show the same kind of downward shift as that of the non-black population (the data on black children in the generation after the millennials suggest high levels of religiosity as well). Afric…

Trump, Islamophobia, and the Philly Pig’s Head Incident

By David Krueger

…ty’s founder, Philadelphia often struggled with religious diversity. In the 1830s and 40s, Irish Catholics poured into Philadelphia and other American cities. (Patricia Miller just wrote about the anti-Catholic backlash that occurred in Baltimore in the 1830s here on RD.) Prominent civic leaders were suspicious that these new immigrants gave their allegiance not to the president of the United States, but to the pontiff in Rome. They questioned whe…