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The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…beings are incredibly capable of doing evil. We do that because we’re survival-oriented creatures. That means we can’t help but be self-centered—and that’s what the church called “original sin.” Christianity doesn’t rescue us from that aspect of our humanity. What Christianity does is lift us beyond the survival mentality into a kind of humanity that can give itself away in love. That’s what the Jesus story is all about. What do you see as the fut…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: “They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!”

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…ultural needs and limits of this community we call America. This community has historically been guided by the values of inclusiveness, egalitarianism, and pluralism, even if it has not always lived up to these high ideals. A new immigration law should reflect these core values. At the same time, we must recognize our historical responsibilities and global obligations. This cosmopolitan recognition can help prevent the anti-immigrant violence that…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…craft engaging narratives. In sum, those of us sitting comfortably in our cheap desk chairs in our sterile offices in the nation’s colleges and universities have no higher ground to stand on. While we all labor to maintain an appropriate level of nuance, complexity, and context in our work, there is no doubt that we could write bigger books and assign our students more reading to gain deeper contextualization and fit more people and more themes a…

Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…the therapist’s couch. From their first moments, online spaces have mingled the privacy of the truck stop bathroom wall and that of the confessional. Penance on the iPhone, whether or not it grows from its larval state, is a fascinatingly unabashed conjunction of the two….

The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

By Peter Laarman

…t. A supposed architect and teacher of architecture, Pecksniff is adept at flimflamming prospective students (and their parents) into paying exorbitant fees to board at his house and learn at his feet. If one of the students should actually have a gift for drafting, Pecksniff passes the work off as his own. But his speech—oh, his sublime speech and gentle affect—is never less than sublimely Christ-like in the estimation of his many admirers. And t…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…ce?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…

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

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…story of the Greek nation I just rehearsed. Trading a Worthless Lake for Valuable Property The Vatopaidi Monastery is led by its abbot, Father Ephraim, and he is assisted by Father Arsenios, who has become the face placed upon this scandal by friend and foe alike. Michael Lewis interviewed him at the monastery for several hours. Here’s what he learned. In the 1980s, the Vatopaidi monastery, like all the monasteries on Athos, was is desperate st…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…lars to explore how congregations in Atlanta are responding to the rapid influx of Latino immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. In the future, I will be reporting from these zones of encounter, on the promises, conflicts, and obstacles that emerge. While our study is still in its early stages, we have found some congregations that are effectively “borderlands” where the question of who gets to belong to the “beloved community” is asked with i…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…the “voluptuous urge to dance.” Consider a smaller outbreak of chorea lasciva, decades later in 1564 at Molenbeek in Flanders, as depicted by the Netherlandish painter Pieter Brueghel. A disquieting scene—at the edges of the painting are two peasant women in bonnet, skirt, and apron, held upright by men on either side of them preventing their collapse; mouths agape, faces contorted, clogged feet kicking in a jig. Between the pair are two musicians…

When Being “Christian” Means Supporting Trump: An Argument For Hiding Your Faith

By Jonathan Malesic

…lar “counterrevolution.” Only a few years later, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, conservative Christian intellectuals were telling the exact opposite story. The writer Rod Dreher now laments the “exiling of Christianity from public life.” Reno writes about the prospect of Christian “dhimmitude” (a popular neologism among Western conservatives that essentially refers to the subordination of Christianity in public life, deliberately evoking th…