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Marriage Vote ‘Transforms’ Not-So-Catholic Ireland; Activist to Malaysian PM – ‘Love Is Not Terrorism’; LGBTs Find Growing Acceptance in Colombia, Not At World Meeting of Families; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…bring its teaching and an understanding of that to young people – not just about gay marriage but maybe about marriage altogether and many other things.” Earlier this month, Kennedy reported that 92 percent of state schools are run by the Catholic Church, but that a growing number of parents are trying to find other options for educating their children. It’s particularly hard for parents whose children are not baptized Catholic, because the school…

African Religious leaders complain about Obama advocacy for LGBT rights; Ultra-Orthodox Man Stabs Jerusalem Pride Parade Marchers, Again; Struggles over sexuality in Islam, Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican Churches; Global LGBT recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ed to Obama’s advocacy saying, “Most Africans care about religious values, about the family, about the complementary nature of man and woman and the culture that makes us Africans. Why can we not choose what ‘benevolence’ to accept from the West? Why can we not just be helped to fight corruption, terrorism, unemployment disease and illiteracy?” “Nobody should be killed for private wayward or immoral behaviors that do not compromise other people’s…

Racialization Meets Purity Culture: Abortion Criminalization Cases Confirm That It’s Always Been About Controlling Women’s Bodies And Protecting the ‘Ideal’ American Family

By Mihee Kim-Kort

…the normalization of narratives grounded in coercion and oppression by delineating who’s deemed proper and acceptable. The overturning of Roe v. Wade and the proliferation of anti-abortion laws isn’t just about babies, it’s about legislating bodies—and not just female bodies, but illegible and unassimilable bodies. It’s about bodies that don’t seem white, or American, or Christian enough….

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…of Taylor’s framing of modernity. Although I am fearless when I talk trash about Brooks at parties, I continue to struggle to pinpoint what, exactly, bothers me about A Secular Age—a book that is so rigorous, subtle, and for the most part, correct in its assessment of what lies behind and before our contemporary condition. According to Taylor, secularity does not connote the erosion of religion as much as the transformation of Western attitudes to…

Evangelicals have “Deep Concerns” about Beck

By Sarah Posner

…e, to be speaking truth when then you talk about the Gospel.” The concerns about Beck are about his Mormonism, but they’re also about Beck himself and how he is positioning himself in the conservative movement. According to Smith, on the Mormon question, the concerns are theological, but also about Beck’s commitment to what Smith (and many conservative evangelicals) call a “Christian worldview.” On the theological point, Smith said: I will say tha…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…icated legacy, writing that the “Catholic Church I grew up in was not just about clunky tradition and occasionally dorky catechism: it was about service to others, liberation theology, and the legacy of scholarship used to enlighten.” Go to top God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Moderns Nathan Schneider UC Press 2013 God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Moderns (2013) by Nathan Schneider – Rising t…

What Fundamentalist Christian Fiction Can Teach Us About Our American Crisis

By Christopher Douglas

…alized data, but rather through the power of narrative; by telling stories about who they are and what they should believe about God, America, and the world. In our special issue, for instance, Andrew Connolly analyzes Peretti’s gender politics, showing that his fiction trains its male readers to understand themselves as engaged in spiritual warfare against “progressive politicians, liberal education, psychology, pro-choice activists, and the medi…

How Far Will White Christians Go to Maintain Power? An Interview with Robert Jones

By Peter Laarman

…-evangelical Protestant numbers are looking pretty good for a change. Talk about this and offer any insights you have about what’s going on. Is it just that the more conservative older ranks are thinning out? Well, we’ve now got two years of very interesting data. We’d like to have three or four years, but still, we see this slight uptick among white people who self-identify as non-evangelical Protestants. And even measured in this way (i.e., by s…

Do Not Arrest the Pope: New Atheists’ Call for the Pope’s Arrest Isn’t Likely to Produce Justice

By Eric Reitan

…horror. That the hierarchy of the church has too often been more concerned about protecting its reputation than about mitigating this horror is a grievous offense. And I think there is evidence to suggest that Ratzinger may have made decisions that were motivated more by concern for preserving the Church’s prestige than for the safety of children. That is, to my mind, a serious moral indictment. But it is not, as such, a legal one. While I have no…

The Bible May Be Stranger Than You Think … And Why It Matters

By Kristin Swenson

…acceptance of interpretations promoted by someone or another—but learning about the Bible’s development, about the historical and physical contexts out of which the books arose, took shape, and what their texts might have meant back then. Learning about the Bible in this way enables people better to interpret any particular text for themselves and place the implications within the context of the whole. Thinking for oneself like this requires the…