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Comparing Gender Transition and Surrogacy to War and Human Trafficking, Vatican’s ‘Dignitas Infinita’ is an Intellectually Embarrassing and Harmful Mess

By Mary E. Hunt

…aters over your head? It only makes the reader wonder what they don’t know about science and money. Such advice, if it had been heeded by these writers, would have avoided unnecessary and unhelpful confusion, injury, and scandal that have characterized the document’s reception—or in many cases, non-reception. Canon lawyer James A. Coriden’s explanation of “The Canonical Doctrine of Reception” comes to mind. This document is a perfect example of te…

Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

By Peter Montgomery

…h and the secular officials have sort of divided this up. The church talks about the coming apocalypse. The church talks about the LGBT movement being the antichrist, and there has been a lot of that kind of talk. And then you have people on television talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the que…

Ian Buruma on the Political Excesses of Religion

By Lisa Webster

…e more zealous populists who have an overtly anti-Islam agenda, don’t talk about Christianity—they talk about the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment used to be associated with the left, with liberals. But now, suddenly, defenders of the Enlightenment argue that the West stands for Enlightenment values and Muslims—religious Muslims—are challenging it, attacking it, undermining. But my view is that they’re using the Enlightenment as a kind of badg…

‘Hell is a World Without You’ Shows Readers How Squarely They Would Have Been on Path to Jan 6 if They’d Come of Age in Evangelicalism

By Michael J. Altman

…is what does it mean to believe something? and you show how belief is not about some assent to an idea but about being part of a group. We don’t have beliefs so much as we identify as the kind of person who believes. What we think of as our beliefs are ways that we recognize ourselves. So, when the beliefs that make us part of a group tell us that we’re broken, shameful, or guilty and under attack from outsiders, it becomes really damaging. A lot…

‘Welcome to the War’: What a Creationist Conference Can Teach us About Evangelical Vaccine Resistance

By Caroline Matas

…tools that these animals apparently no longer possess. While this view is “about” science, it’s also about something simultaneously deeper and more insidious—the idea that the world is split into the small, faithful remnant that possesses a narrow, correct, Godly “worldview” and… everyone else, whose beliefs are not only unbiblical but actively wicked and hostile to God and Christians. Even self-proclaimed Christians are not guaranteed to be in th…

The Avengers, Rogue Roombas, and Robot Accountability

By Hilary Ledwell and Michael Schulson

…AI souls though, which is also totally fascinating, both for what it says about AI and what it says about evangelicals. MHS: Or what it says about the capacity of certain pastors to grab media attention and run with it. I still feel like most of these accounts of AI in the general culture—whether breathless science journalism or movies like Avengers: Age of Ultron—are mostly about your stance toward certain big topics. Souls: convert them all! Th…

Debating God: Atheist and Evangelical Face Off at Notre Dame

By Nathan Schneider

…Harris impressed him by sticking it to Notre Dame’s Catholics. “Everything about this university is so appropriate!” He and his friend argued about whether it’s dishonest to be just “socially” Catholic. The girl they were with took off. Eventually I made my way to a reception at Morris Inn, the on-campus hotel. The organizers were there, as was Craig, his wife Jan, and a handful of philosophy professors. Harris made an appearance later, and one of…

What the Critics of the Mindfulness Trend Don’t Get

By Hollis Phelps

Mindfulness, its advocates contend, offers a better life. Now used as a catch-all term for a slew of eastern-derived (or -inspired) meditative practices, mindfulness promises practitioners many benefits: respite from the bruising demands of everyday, normal life as well as more lasting rewards, from physical and mental health to inner peace and personal transformation. All of that sounds great, of course, but the trend is not without its critics….

Capricology: Divine Madness

By Salman Hameed

…Lev train memorial is being taken apart are moving, I can’t help but think about 9/11, when memorials and notes cropped up all over New York City as people waited, and hoped for word about their loved ones. The pain on Amanda’s face was very much like what happened to people who grieved again once the memorials were taken down some time after 9/11. With laws being enacted about roadside memorials and the like, I thought this was a interesting way…

Debating Death: Is It Really the End?

By Angela Bonavoglia

…te seeing or telepathy or telekinesis or clairvoyance that is being talked about here is in utter and complete violation of everything we understand about the current laws of physics, the fundamental way that matter and energy work. That demands that the evidence for such things must be “amazingly good,” he added, and today, “the evidence in favor of psychic phenomena comes nowhere near that standard.” “My response is that the evidence for things…