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When the Church’s LGBTIQ Loss is the World’s Gain

By Mary E. Hunt

…of becoming a minister. Enter: Presbyterian heterosexism. As a student at San Francisco Theological Seminary in the 1980s, Selisse chose honesty over ordination, integrity over church employment. She tells the wonderful story of her first organizing effort (the prelude to Out & Equal). Along with a “fun group of women, smart, and creative, with whom I felt totally free to be myself,” Selisse started Seminary Lesbians Under Theological Stress—or S…

How Does an Atheist Come to Believe in God?: An Interview with Jacob Needleman

By Lisa Webster

…gious teaching. In other words, I can be excited at a football game by the San Francisco 49ers, and I can, with the same quality of energy, the same part of myself, be similarly excited by the Bible, or the teachings of Jesus, or Buddhism, or something of that kind. The object is different, but the actual emotion can be the same. You can even say, “I love hamburgers!” and then, “I love my child.” Is it the same emotional entity, only the object ha…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…in his long and arduous path to Christianity. As I searched for a theological category to come to terms with our context, the word concupiscence leapt out at me. A theme that emerges in Augustine’s corpus is how we have misguided desire, or lust and passion, in relation to the material world and other human beings. How does Augustine define lust and passion? He often describes it as concupiscence: strong desire, especially sexual, that sometimes…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…should be. This, it would seem, is the site of a deep division within American evangelicalism. There’s a serious difference of opinion over what values should be paramount in making movies. Left Behind could have been the vehicle for showing how this problem could be solved, but it didn’t work. The fight that Lalonde had with authors of the book and that Lalonde had with fans of the movies who were anxious about the remake will continue. And it do…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…slims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us out to be (our earliest heroes include Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Malcolm X), but we’ve had real problems with narrow-mindedness, institutional immaturity, misogyny, and religious illiteracy—these persist in places, but I think not like they did before. And that’s because American Muslims were able to separate Islam from its prac…

Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

By Sarah Posner

…an exemption from covering ella, Plan B, and IUDs, claiming that they may cause an abortion. Scalia declared these methods “not terribly expensive.” But Verilla pointed out that the IUD, one of the most effective methods of birth control, is also one of the most expensive. (They can cost as much as $1,000.) As expected, the Court did not question in any depth the companies’ claim that these methods are abortifacients. But in response to a hypothe…

Why Serra Should Not Be a Saint

By Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

…e lives of indigenous rebels when some local Kumeyaay revolted against the San Diego mission (1775), a revolt led by runaway converts. The revolt entailed the death of Fr. Luis Jayme, whom Serra portrayed as a martyr. For the rest of the Spanish imperial period, California was a remote backwater of little interest, and though, after Serra died (in 1784), his student and fellow missionary Francisco Palóu quickly wrote a biography (published in 1787…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…statement of fault. For example, I withheld my own judgment of JetBlue and assumed larger possible causes, until they also cancelled our final flight home during Emmie’s and my return from Iran. Now I can call JetBlue a motherfucker with confidence. And it’s all thanks to science. *Note: Follow these links for full length interviews with Richard Rothstein and Bertram Malle….

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

By Michael Schulson

…vailable to commodification.” The melding of Eastern spirituality and American capitalism isn’t new. As the popularity of yoga demonstrates, adapted ritual practices can sell. (Much the same could be said, too, about many martial arts). Spiritual practices can also be harnessed for corporate ends. “American capitalism has had a long and durable romance with Eastern spirituality,” Michelle Goldberg wrote last year on newyorker.com. “For well over a…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…AIDS units of 1980s Los Angeles. Rev. Penny Nixon, who ministered in MCC’s San Francisco congregation in the 1990s, felt bodily memories of AIDS ministry rise in the first few weeks of Covid and then recede in the face of the also-familiar need to put feelings away and get to work. “How we got through the last pandemic,” she said, “it became the reality. You put your head down and you do it.” For Karen Ziegler, the political parallels have been al…