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“I Was a Wild Man”: How to Decode Evangelical Testimony

By Eric C. Miller

…g down from a high, and literally fell to the floor. “God, I have tried my best to ignore you and to do things my way,” he remembers praying. “I’m broken. I’m broken and in need of fixing.” A classic prodigal son story followed. Tchividjian recommitted himself to Christ, entered the seminary, became a minister. He married and had three children. He started the New City Presbyterian Church, a 450-member church in Coconut Creek. Tchividjian’s “class…

Will Trump’s Weakness Threaten White Evangelical Support?

By Kristin Kobes Du Mez

…. At first glance, evangelical support for Trump appeared transactional at best, hypocritical at worst. In fact, evangelical support for Trump was consistent with a longstanding preference for militant masculine leadership. Militant white masculinity has always been at the center of family-values evangelicalism. In the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals insisted that strong, patriarchal authority would defend families against the incursions of feminism…

Because the Bible Has a Liberal Bias

By Daniel Schultz

…find within its covers), but the record of very fallible people doing the best they can to live up to their faith. Complaining about liberal bias or sexism or gross violation of moral standards in scripture just reveals ignorance, however well intentioned. The Bible’s not there to provide timeless certainty. Far from it. In fact, it’s there to do just the opposite: provoke arguments and unsettle what it is that we think we know. Because as it tur…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…New Jersey parochial schools (or maybe because of it). Real life Hollywood best friends Ben Affleck and Matt Damon play Bartleby and Loki, fallen angels who attempt to manipulate a theological loophole in the hopes of returning to Heaven—even if it means the destruction of reality. Several characters gather to prevent this, including Jesus’s last living relative, the secret thirteenth apostle Rufus as played by comedian Chris Rock, and the angel M…

Polygamy, Genius, and the Origin of Religion

By Michael Schulson

…so that they invest that pregnancy or egg-laying energy in babies with the best possible genes. This story is a rough approximation of a theoretical model. But that model has a lot of descriptive power in animals. So how does all of this play out in people? Barash lays out a strong case that human beings, and our primate forebears, were polygamous. His evidence is primatological (our primate relatives today are mostly polygamous), anthropological…

Personhood Ohio Claims Bible Dictates Criminal Penalties for Abortion

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…rpretation on the part of those who claim that the Bible is clear.) To the best of my knowledge—and I am no Hebrew Bible scholar—the Hebrew is something like “the baby comes out but no harm follows,” which some people interpret as meaning that the mother miscarries but is herself unharmed; and others interpret to mean that the baby is born premature but is unharmed. So they get in discussions, as people do about Bible translations, in which they m…

Pigging Out: What ‘Radically Unkosher’ Jewish Foodies Like Michael Pollan Are Missing

By Jonathan Schorsch

…e food movement must be how to make use of the best of rationalism and the best of traditional ways. Believing that tradition will “save us” is as deluded as believing that its elimination will. Jewish tradition itself acknowledges anxieties over law and restricted behavior. One explanation is often cited to suggest that after the coming of the messiah the pig will change its nature—it will start to chew its cud—and become kosher. In a perfected w…

Why I’m Not An Organ Donor

By Kristel Clayville

…g to take. The social review by the team is highly subjective, even in the best scenarios. Since donated organs are a scarce resource, the goal is often to find the best host (recipient) for the organ so that it does not go to waste. In that environment, organs tend to go to people who can have a full-time caregiver, has family who will help with care, doesn’t take personal risks, and has a medical history of doing what doctors tell them to do. Al…

Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism

By Jonathan L. Walton

…casting is new. Again, many regard it as a post-civil rights phenomenon at best, or the co-opting of the black church by the white religious right at worst. But the confluence of mass media and Afro-Protestantism dates back to religious race records of the 1920s and is as “authentically black” as James Brown. From prominent Pentecostal preachers like Leora Ross, F.W. McGee, and Mother Rosa Artimus Horn during the interwar period to C.L. Franklin a…

The Most Forgotten Queer Folks in the US are Fighting Back Against a Powerful — and Publicly Funded — Group That Discriminates With Impunity

By Chrissy Stroop

…to arouse the ire of every American who supports the idea that justice is best protected by a secular government. Religious organizations that wish to receive federal funding should be subjected to the same rules for recipients of that funding as secular organizations, and if they wish to violate the rules by discriminating against members of a protected class, that funding should simply be off-limits, whether we’re talking about adoption agencie…