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Godly Game or Godless Satire? Countering Biblical Ignorance with Heretical Humor

By Betsy Shirley

…y.” “Controversial” and “problematic” are hardly exaggerations; sandwiched between Sunday-school standbys like David and Goliath, Mary and Joseph, and Psalm 23 are plenty of stories that aren’t often preached from the pulpit. These stories, featured on the cards of A Game for Good Christians, range from bizarre (“Death by hungry worms, Acts 12:21-23”), to disgusting (“Bread freshly baked with human dung, Ezekiel 4:12”), to truly horrifying (“God-s…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…some of the nation’s most outspoken conservative bishops—and allies of the Republican Party—who seem to take the whole “prince of the church” thing more literally than some of their fellow prelates. Here’s a rundown: • New York Cardinal Timothy “Capitalism is King but you can get your birth control at 7-11” Dolan lives in a 15,000-square foot neo-Gothic mansion on Madison Avenue appraised at $30 million. • Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who w…

‘Good Wife’ Alicia Florrick is an Atheist (and Drinks a Lot)

By Lisa Webster

…peats that she is a straight up atheist, not agnostic, not wondering. Safe bet that this is the most often the word ‘atheist’ has been used in a single episode of a network drama. The wrinkle is that her daughter is part of a youth-y evangelical group, having converted a few seasons back. The writers use her for comic effect sometimes, as when the grownups are in crisis around the kitchen table and you suddenly hear a group of teenage girls beltin…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more familiar with, the Roman alphabet. Say someone’s name was Vic. Each letter in his name is also a Roman numeral. V=5, I=1, C=100. Using gematria, we find that Vic’s number is 5+1+100, or 106. So whose name adds up to 666? Most biblical scholars believe the beast was the Roman emperor Nero. Nero’s title in Latin was Caesar Nero. The equivalent in Greek, the lan…

Anti-Vaxxers Illustrate Danger of Overly Broad Religious Freedom Laws

By Kara Loewentheil

…ed into the legislative history of each of these laws, I think it’s a fair bet that when they were passed the religious exemptions were intended to protect a very small percentage of the population with religious objections to vaccination, like Christian Scientists or some parts of the Amish community. It’s unlikely that the exemptions were intended to be used by the growing number of well-educated and well-off parents whose version of a “natural”…

Vatican Council on Women Would Be Funny Were it Not So Insulting

By Mary E. Hunt

…olic terms, are not. Imagine a similar discussion of the masculine body. I bet the mere suggestion of penis enlargements as a moral issue for men would stop more conversations than it would start. Try a simple substitute of ‘masculine’ for ‘feminine’ in this section of the document: Plastic surgery that is not medico-therapeutic can be aggressive toward the masculine identity, showing a refusal of the body in as much as it is a refusal of the ‘sea…

The Man in the Red Dress: My Unlikely Friendship with Cardinal Francis George

By Cathleen Falsani

…u say, ‘Well, that’s not so!’ You try to be polite, but people should know better,” he told me once as we discussed what he called “wrong ideas about God.” “Christ is not an idea. Christ is a person. But ideas about him are very important. If you have a wrong idea, that stops your growth in God,” he said. “People within the church should know better and just are ignorant of the facts, no matter what you think about them. That puzzles me.” We had o…

These Are the New Battlegrounds for LGBT Rights Under Trump

By Sunnivie Brydum

…an affirmatively anti-LGBT-rights position and intervene to make religious-freedom or free-speech arguments on behalf of the defendants in LGBT discrimination cases brought under state laws. Which brings us to the final and overarching point of how to agitate for equality in Trump’s America: Get to Your Statehouses Even before Trump’s unlikely electoral victory, each new legislative session brought a cornucopia of anti-LGBT bills introduced in sta…

Women’s Equality in the Church is No Longer Negotiable

By Mary E. Hunt

…r what grounds them biologically. Being “created in the image of God” is a better bet. We are all learning together about this, some of us more willing to admit what we do not know than others. But we can certainly agree in the meantime that persons trump genitals, that competence and willingness to serve are far more relevant than gender identity when it comes to Christian life. This means ordination and decision making for women on a par with me…

What the Conservative Christian “Fake-Trans Bathroom Creeper” Has To Do With Suburban Anxiety

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…That boundary is harder to find in most American cities, where the divide between “Anytown” and “the greater Anytown area” might not be a line at all, but a more gradual widening of lot sizes, along with some demographic shifts. A lot of people who aren’t residents of a city proper might have to do business in the city limits daily, both relying on and contributing to the city’s economic strength. Which brings us to Springfield, Missouri. And Fay…