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Why the Church is Struggling to Hold Onto Millennial Catholics

By Kaya Oakes

…olics who will take an interest in serving the church for life and in evangelizing their non-religious peers. Whether groups like FOCUS or Opus Dei or schools like Ave Maria will be able to recruit enough young Catholics to counterbalance the increasing number of Nones, however, is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the more young Catholics start to embrace marriage equality, safe and legal abortion, access to contraception, and the liberal…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…MNDFL is more open about its spiritual dimensions, even if it describes itself as non-religious. Rinzler, unlike Yalof Schwartz, downplays the scientific justifications for meditation. “I come from a Buddhist background that’s been saying, ‘Yeah, we’ve been telling you guys this for 2,600 years,’” Rinzler said in a talk at Google last February, after citing research about meditation’s neurological benefits. But the pricing model, the basic busines…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…n ruined by the Academy. The movie is very well staged. Stein presents himself as a well-meaning, skeptical, and regular guy who wanders across a collection of disturbing events, which just don’t seem right. With the help of unlikely suspects like established scientists Richard Dawkins and William Provine (who come across a bit like babbling hellfire and brimstone preachers of science), the film manages to build a case that: 1) it is un-American t…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…isemitic slogans. For good measure, they’ve thrown in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Eliot Spitzer endorsing the sentiments behind the Occupy movement; ergo, the three of them must hate the Jews too. This, of course, is ridiculous. As everybody should know by now, Occupy is a leaderless, open-source movement. That means, unfortunately, that the nuts have free rein. When I last visited Occupy Wall Street, there was indeed a concatenation of weird…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…important ways in which the candidate himself now projects the essence of televangelism. As the campaign enters the final days, Candidate Romney increasingly exhorts his audiences to dare to have faith in the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11.1), to dare to imagine a whole new life for themselves under this very rich man’s care, to dare to believe in the Gospel of Wealth, and to be saved, finally, from real…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…ll” topped the Billboard charts, Jimmy Carter was in the White House, and cell phones were the size of a brick. But those aren’t the only differences between Pope John Paul II’s historic 1979 visit and Pope Francis’ virgin trip to the US this week. Pope Francis will find a church that is markedly different in a number of significant ways; so different, in fact, that it calls into question whether we can still refer to the Catholic Church in the US…

What a Turn-of-the-Century Anti-Abortion and Contraception Crusader Reveals About GOP Efforts to Ban Abortion Pills by Mail

By Steven K. Green

….) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court upheld a law banning the mailing of lottery tickets—and by implication the Comstock Act itself—with the opinion declaring that: “[t]he power possessed by Congress embraces the regulation of the entire postal system of the country. The right to designate what shall be carried necessarily involves the right to determine what shall be excluded.” (Ex parte Jackson, 1878) The point…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…space are said to be different in Black Rock City. No one was talking on cell phones, clocks were largely invisible, and the city’s layout reoriented participants with its semi-circular streets running from A to L. This year the letters marked various rites of passage: Anniversary, Birthday, Coming Out, Divorce, Engagement, Funeral, Graduation, Hajj, Initiation, Journey, Kindergarten, and Liminal. Bisecting the rites of passage streets were cross…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…tried to calm some who were scared and close to panic. As far as I could tell, the TSA personnel and other security officials seemed know about as much as the passengers about what was happening—all around me, I sensed a complete failure of nerve. A black woman wearing a security vest crouched outside on the tarmac hiding, behind a luggage container, sobbing uncontrollably. Why was I the only one reaching out to her? I tapped her on her shoulder…

An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

By Austin Dacey

Dear Mr. Smisek: Delayed flights, telephone customer care wait times, negotiations between United Continental Holdings and its employees: these are among the things with which this letter is not concerned, you may be relieved to know. Perhaps you would agree that in the final analysis, such things are of no concern. No, Mr. Smisek, this message is not the grievance of a disgruntled customer. It is a witness to an abomination. It is a plea for spi…