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Blankets, Booties, and Jesus: Spiritual War on the Uterus in Rick Perry’s Texas

By Sarah Posner

…uttmacher Institute. Thirty-five percent of Texas women between the ages of 15 and 44 are uninsured, 13% higher than the national rate. Texas also has a higher rate of teen pregnancy than the national average, 88 pregnancies per 1,000 teen women, compared with 70 per 1,000 nationally. Yet in the face of this, the Texas legislature slashed family planning funding by two-thirds in 2011. The Republican-led legislature allocated another $8.4 million o…

When it Comes to Societal Dominion, the Details Matter: A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation, Part II

By Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné

…agner distinguished between those who possess the gift (mentioned by God in 1 Corinthians 12) and those who hold the office of apostle. According to Wagner, the office of apostle is achieved through works and is conferred by fellow apostolic leaders. It is the public affirmation that someone has the God-endowed spiritual gift and is worthy of assuming apostolic authority. Some therefore have the gift but have not yet (if ever) earned the recogniti…

Ross Douthat’s Missing Pregnant Women

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…bjects of all of the sentences just quoted: “Cultural forces,” “retreat,” “spirit,” “it,” “decadence,” and “it.” Astounding. In a paragraph where Douthat besmirches those whose choices contribute to declining fertility—accusing them of being “haunted” and unwilling to make sacrifices—he says exactly nothing about actual people. And again, he shows a breathtaking lack of attention to the trade-offs involved in the actual having of the babies, or h…

Free Arabs: Satire, Disobedience, and Disclaimers

By Nabil Echchaibi

…. If there is such a thing as a defining paradigm, or at least an enduring spirit, of the Arab Spring, it has to be the fact that it never was a total revolution or a drastic historical moment with universal political preferences. The Arab Spring was and still is, as Hamid Dabashi has aptly noted in the context of the 2009 Iranian Green Movement, “an open-ended revolt, in which not just the ruling regime but also any other regime that may succeed…

Rising Christian Right Movement, New Apostolic Reformation, Emerged as a Mid-20th Century Splinter of White Supremacy

By Keri Ladner

…during the public years of her ministry, and when Angelus Temple opened in 1923, it was America’s first megachurch. Notably, Pentecostalism has, since its founding in the early 1900s, been a racially diverse movement; the leader of the Azusa Street Revival, William Seymour, was the son of emancipated slaves in Louisiana. However, this racial diversity belies a dark theological heritage that is anything but kind to non-Whites (or, for that matter,…

Five Must-Reads on the “Nones”: A Tipping Point in American Religion and Spirituality

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ornia, is at once on the margins and at the center of late modern American spirituality. Early spiritual experimentation at Esalen popularized practices such as yoga, meditation, reiki, and past-life regression, and the success of Esalen encouraged invited the development of retreat centers of myriad spiritual and traditional religious varieties across the country. As such, Esalen has played a central role in the vast commercializing of American s…

Occupy’s Sacred Mob and the Politics of Vagrancy

By Vincent Gonzalez

…e—is beginning for this broken-down, halfway collapsing, senile society: a spirit of examination.” In this lecture Caillois asserts that rapid changes in the notion of “the individual” (perhaps like those facilitated by capitalist globalization and ubiquitous social media) will produce a social “climate” through which only new forms of organic solidarity will survive. Furthermore, what the College did, drawing from biblical and ethnographic data o…

What’s a Faith-Healing Congregation to Do When Measles Hits?

By Rob Shryock

…God praise for that. When George Pearsons says that they “commanded” the “spirit of measles” to leave, he’s not being figurative. Pearsons believes that you can be cured of almost any ailment by a ritual recitation of God’s word. He claimed in Sunday’s sermon that people could, “take authority over their bodies” by using “words of dominion,” saying that, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.” In context, Pearsons’s sermon comes off as…

Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” Depicts Death Struggle Between Hope and Despair

By Peter Laarman

…for destroying those who destroy the earth. It seems pretty clear that the spirit of radical mystic Thomas Merton hovers over this film. Merton’s name comes up twice in the screenplay, and both Schrader and his protagonist seem to resonate with the words that Merton wrote in 1962 to Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan theologian, poet, and revolutionary: The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with e…

The Women’s March, Anti-Semitism, and ‘The Jewish Farrakhan’

By Shaul Magid

…ed from the community. But this would be an error. Through much of the late 1960s and 1970s, many prominent and mainstream Jews repudiated Kahane’s racism and use of violence, but they nonetheless defended his right to speak and be part of the Jewish conversation. In a 1971 Look Magazine poll, moreover, one in four American Jews polled had a “positive attitude” about the JDL. In the late 1960s there was a push in The Young Israel of Brookline cong…