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

By Jonathan Malesic

…Bush’s presidency, when I wrote the book. Since then, I have rethought my strong stance in favor of secrecy. But the deep problem remains the same: by identifying their faith so strongly with politics, conservative Christians have married their self-understanding to the fortunes of the Republican Party’s presidential candidates. Even if that candidate manifestly aims only at self-aggrandizement, well, so be it. In the Bush years, conservative Chr…

After Orlando: Love Wins, But When?

By Daniel Schultz

…magic of boys? So be it. Whoever he loves, he loves, and we will do our best to foster their bonds. He is a tender and responsible young man. I have no doubt that he will marry for life. +++ It has been a week of great loss. On Saturday night, a gunman in a central Florida nightclub took 49 mostly young, mostly brown, mostly gay lives. I marvel at the brief biographies of the dead I have seen, how many of them floated to Orlando from distant poin…

Holding Out for a Hero: New ID Book Aims to Save You From Despair of Evolution

By Kriti Sharma

…y Hollywood movie seems to involve a hero swooping in to save the day against vast and uncertain odds. More importantly, every movie creates a situation where all problems, however daunting or complex, meet at a single point. The Death Star is formidable and impossibly well-defended, but a single laser directed at its vulnerable heart will bring the whole complex down. Scale a problem down, make it smaller and smaller and smaller, and you finally…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…maller brains” (Houston Chronicle) In fact, that’s a somewhat selective list of stories on the findings of a highly selective study. Involving less than three hundred people, the study looked at the brain volume of a group of people it divvied up according to religious affiliation (Protestant, Catholic, “born again” and unaffiliated). (Un)born again Protestants apparently won the brain volume prize. Bracketing the question of who devises studies…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…ugh, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quickly ran into a problem that’s been under discussion for at least two thousand years. As Gregory Smith, the Director of U.S. Religion Surveys at Pew, explained…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…, monks point out that they are increasingly treated as actors on the tourist stage. For example, the daily debate sessions in Lhasa’s large monasteries, one of the most important venues for monastic learning, must be convened at a time that is convenient for the local tourist industry. During the peak of the tourist season, busloads of tourists descend on the monasteries in the early afternoon, cameras in hand. It is not uncommon for tourists to…

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

By Annika Brockschmidt

…In 2016, a “Reichsbürger” shot and killed a police officer. During a protest against Covid-19 restrictions in 2020, several people managed to enter the Reichstag building of the German parliament and hundreds with ties to the “Reichsbürger” were arrested. The terror group seems to have followed prominent QAnon beliefs of the “Deep State.” According to Lamberty, the timing of the attack is no coincidence: “Especially during the pandemic we could s…

Of God, But Not God: A Methodist Minister Speaks About Church’s Refusal to Open Its Doors to LGBT

By Joel Pitney

…was it that made you want to become a minister? Well, my dad was a Methodist minister and I grew up in the church. My dad died when I was 7 years old and I remember that when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say I wanted to be a minister. They’d smile politely because everybody knew that little girls couldn’t be ministers. I learned not to answer that. By the time I went off to college I was planning to be a teacher…

Students at Conservative Catholic College Speak After Sudden Cancellation of Pro-Gay Speaker

By Rob Shryock

…surgical mask. This feeling is sadly familiar, to me and to any gay person. It is the malaise of the closet, the notion that some features of oneself are unspeakable. I am the Other. And if I feel that way, I can only imagine how young gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender Providence College students must feel. It is for them that I remain most concerned. Corvino mentioned that he had received a great number of emails from LGBT students at Provi…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…“cultic.” The biggest megablock outside of the Catholic Church, and the fastest growing of all? The postdenominational block, 385 million strong by 2000. Wagner calls this block “neo-Apostolic.” It’s bigger now than in 2000, he says, and Wagner notes that it’s the only megablock growing faster than the earth’s population and faster than Islam. Wagner’s cell phone rings mid-lecture; a Hank Williams ringtone. The class laughs. In fact, it’s probabl…