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LGBTQ Methodists on Whether the United Methodist Church Will Ever Affirm LGBTQ People

By Tris Mamone

On February 26th, the United Methodist Church (UMC) voted against affirming same-sex marriages and noncelebate LGBTQ clergy at their annual General Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. The Church had three plans laid out before it: the Simple Plan, which would remove all references to homosexuality from the Book of Discipline; the Traditional Plan, which would ban same-sex marriages and LGBTQ clergy; and the One Church Plan, which would leave all d…

Mormon-Born Daya Mata Typifies American Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain

…oga studios, college fitness centers, and even in some churches across the United States—there is no mention of devotion, unless it is to beauty, fitness, or well-being. But Daya Mata’s death reminds us that yoga has taken a variety of forms in the United States. Like the history of yoga in South Asia, American yoga has no single essence or form. It has meant a variety of things to American practitioners for a long time. Indeed, it’s in and throu…

Is the Prochoice Religious Community a Sleeping Giant?

By Frederick Clarkson

…l significant prochoice minorities among Mormons and White evangelicals. A number of leading mainline Protestant denominations are officially prochoice, including The Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. As is most of organized Judaism. There are also deeply considered prochoice theological traditions within all of major world religious traditions present in t…

Secularism in the US is Larger, More Diverse and More Dynamic Than Ever, But You Wouldn’t Know it From the Media

By Chrissy Stroop

…s as mostly atheists and agnostics when they clearly are not (although the numbers of atheists and agnostics are rising as well), the subtext that the nones haven’t fully thought through their choice to disaffiliate from religion is offensive—and it’s a prime example of how journalists talk over nones instead of to us. Bolling, by contrast, works directly with students, which gives him valuable insight into their mindset and decision making. “Some…

Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

By Danny Fisher

…ives that, disappointingly, grow less and less helpful as they increase in number and length. When I spoke to Bhikkhu Bodhi about the fracas in an interview last fall, he cautioned against interpreting his statements as a blanket endorsement of military solutions: I think what has to take priority now, since the formation of the United Nations, are the conditions for just warfare that are laid down within their charter. One is that a nation is jus…

The Black Church: Institution or Abstraction?

By Anthony B. Pinn

…e in the United States are black churches, as varied in orientation as the number of congregations. There are millions of African American Christians housed in thousands of churches across the country; some of them rather large and others small in number. In using this phrase, we must remain mindful of the similarities and differences between local congregations, spread across urban and rural areas that the term, “Black Church,” easily covers. It…

As Psychedelics Experience a Renaissance, Emory’s New Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality Seeks a Novel Approach

By Hollis Phelps

…s—as well as in palliative care. A number of prominent institutions in the United States currently host centers devoted to studying the mechanisms, effects, and efficacy of psychedelics, including NYU’s Center for Psychedelic Medicine, Johns Hopkins’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In addition, and anticipating the legal and sociocultural acceptance of the therapeutic va…

Even After an Obama Victory Reports of the Death of the Religious Right are Greatly Exaggerated

By Bill Berkowitz

…, D.C. has been seriously diminished,” as the Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State wrote early this morning, even in an Obama administration, expect some or all of the following to take place against the backdrop of a mainstream media giddy with reports of the demise of the religious right. Right off the bat, longtime leaders of the religious right, monitoring every move Obama’s transition team makes, will dis…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…piety of life, with the practice of all moral duties. Not until definition number four in that dictionary do we find that religion might, beyond Christians, include “pagans and Mohammedans.” Of course, that definition ends with, “We speak of false religion as well as true religion” (emphasis his). It should come as no surprise that Webster’s 1828 version is the dictionary of choice for home-schoolers across the United States. The outlook on langua…

Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

By Elesha Coffman

…nce existed mainly to train full-time pastors faced reductions in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a…