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Conversion Story #643 (not a real number)

By Amina Wadud

…e the biblical story of Noah’s ark. Then he told me God had promised never again to destroy the world by water. The symbol of that promise, he said, is the rainbow. For a brief moment, everything in this world disappeared. Nothing remained except for the joy and the mercy of that divine promise. Still, by the time I was a teenager, I had ventured to other churches to seek the varieties of Christian faith expressions. In high school, I lived with J…

From Pastor to Harvard’s ‘Godless Church’ Planter

By Becky Garrison

…ans to guiding the formation of godless communities. For those who aren’t aware of your very public journey this past year, what led you to take the podium and out yourself as an atheist at the 2012 American Atheist Convention? I was raised in the Deep South where my dad was a Baptist pastor. I always felt my calling was to be in ministry but the Baptist church didn’t allow women pastors. As I moved through my young adulthood, my theology became…

New Poll Finds “Growing Appetite” for Mixing Religion and Politics

By Sarah Posner

…njecting religion into electoral politics, a growing perception that the Obama administration is “unfriendly” to religion, and discontent among white evangelicals with how the Republican Party represents their interests. Heading into the mid-term elections, and looking ahead to the 2016 presidential campaign, these results should prove unsettling for advocates of untangling religion from electoral politics, as they could signal to candidates that…

The Benedict Opt-Out: Why Christian Self-Isolation Won’t Work

By Kaya Oakes

…tines “built lives of peace, order and learning,” but also taught nearby peasants “practical skills, like farming,” while educating those same peasants in the Christian faith. Dreher’s model of what a modern monastic community would look like is based on several small communities of traditional Catholics and Orthodox Christians (Dreher himself is a former Catholic who converted to Orthodoxy), who have left urban and even suburban life behind to pu…

The Religious Mourning of ‘Saint’ Kobe Bryant Continues

By Terry Shoemaker

…number 24, while the other wore number 2, Gianna’s uniform number. The MVP award, given this year to Los Angeles Clippers’ star forward Kawhi Leonard, was renamed permanently for Kobe Bryant. Pregame and half-time shows centered on Kobe, his family, and his impact on the sport of basketball and society. The collective grief and bereavement displayed by fans and players alike not only demonstrate the power of sports in American society, they’re ind…

Sharing Many of the Same Flaws as its Subject ‘The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill’ Podcast Puts Blame Anywhere But Where It Belongs

By Jessica Johnson

…s? Why are we regularly platforming people whose charisma outpaces their character and who leave devastation in their wake? Something attracts us, we buy in, and then we watch the collapse like spectators at a demolition derby. Understanding why this happens is really the purpose of this whole podcast.” Compelling as it sounds, there are problems with this framing, if the goal is to truly understand a broader phenomenon within the evangelical chur…

Is LGBT-Muslim Clash Aiding Rise of Right in Europe?

By Peter Montgomery

…ty Day (Bi Visibility Day) on Saturday, September 23, capping off Bisexual Awareness Week. Hanoi Pride’s week of events concluded on September 24. Catholic Church: Controversy over bridge-building book reflects larger struggle within hierarchy James Martin, a Jesuit priest whose book promoting bridge-building between the church and gay Catholics has exposed him to vehement criticism from anti-LGBT Catholics, described his experience at the hands o…

Are Muslims Nuts?

By Haroon Moghul

…es, our media has dramatically exaggerated the response (with Newsweek’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali piling on with her usual opportunistic silliness). Still, there were protests, calls for censorship, condemnations of the U.S. government for something it had nothing to do with, and tragic acts of violence, including very early on the death of several American diplomats and staff. Why? We seem to have some trouble applying insights we consume in popular cultu…

New Poll Reveals a Paradox in Evangelical Support for Donald Trump

By Daniel Schultz

It’s not every day a legitimate paradox turns up in national polling. But the Pew Research Center’s recent survey on the influence of religion on American public life seems to have uncovered one. According to Pew, nearly three-quarters of White evangelicals think it’s important to have a presidential candidate with strong religious beliefs—indeed, a similar proportion want a candidate who shares their beliefs. Yet just 6% of those same voters thi…

Mister Rogers’ Radical Pacifist Neighborhood

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…e threatening to the reader than she might expect. Not that Long unearths salacious secrets—this isn’t a scandalous tell-all. But those of us who grew up watching Mister Rogers may discover, in reading Peaceful Neighbor, that we were hoping for a hagiography. Instead, Long offers us moments of Rogers being human—and that includes conflicts with cast members, decisions that were not as prophetic or consistent as one might wish in retrospect, and ev…