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Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…ted to get the kids thinking,” they told me. When I wondered if purchasing tickets for the kids using Salvation Army funds could be a violation of the church’s tax-exempt status, Miranda argued that she didn’t see a problem. Since the Bible is applicable to every facet of private and public life, she reasoned, how it would be possible to talk to the kids about anything government-related without jeopardizing their tax-exemption? “Our hands would b…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…r “Ripple” conversation, and today, there are hundreds of Dead songs on my phone and dozens of live recordings in playlists, even a nod when I see a Deadhead sticker on a car. I am a relapsed Catholic, and thanks to my friend, I am also a repentant Deadhead. Dear Jesus, let me confess: I even wear Birkenstocks. Shannon. Deadshow, Deadhead. Dominquez Hills, 1990. Photo by ChasM3/https://www.flickr.com/photos/chasm3/ “Sugar Magnolia,” however, still…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…lots of other North Carolinians’) values like so much heresy. Every time I buy something with sales tax, I tacitly support that government. So I do feel personally out of place, without recourse, isolated, backward. I offered this concern to Bell when we spoke on the phone. He responded thoughtfully, but cautiously. “Oh yeah. See the thing is: we actually do have real, life-or-death problems going on. And many of us are totally convinced that this…

Mel Gibson’s ‘To-Do’ List

By Becky Garrison

…peat Pope Benedict 1. Order unkosher communion wafers 2. Get a little behind in work 3. Party like it’s 1483 4. Two-four-six-eight, who should I excommunicate? 5. Order Mother Teresa sticky buns 6. Fine vendors selling Pope on a rope Bristol Palin 1. Pray for mom’s soul 2. Buy Revolve 2010 (Biblezine) 3. Get Promise Keepers application for Levi 4. Become a True Woman 5. Baby Making Time! 6. Refill prescription for Prozac Spencer Pratt 1. Get saved…

Healed of the Sin of Religion: At Church with Sara Miles

By Lisa Webster

…y. Or you can’t, if you don’t have the money. But at this table nobody can buy the bread and wine. It’s just given away. And so that is how we run the food pantry. You can’t buy it, you can’t earn it, you can’t deserve it. You make the point of not making people sign up, or sign in, the way we do if we need government aid. Right. You don’t have to prove anything. The imitation of God’s gesture in feeding us all is frightening, and difficult, and e…

How the Catholic Church Broke the Health Insurance it Advocated For

By Patricia Miller

…ou’re never going to use.” Now aside from the fact that “forcing” women to buy health insurance policies that cover prostate cancer is, in the bad vacation home analogy, like “buying a bungalow on the Jersey Shore that you are never going to use,” Shimkus is correct. Before the ACA, many individual insurance policies didn’t cover maternity care. Women who wanted that luxury needed to pay for a pregnancy rider that ran about $5,000—in other words,…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…

“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…re so fantastic—brought the idea that the whole thing is static. I think a number of people picked up over the past three hundred years that space is empty, we move things around in space, and there are levers and pulleys and buttons. I think for a number of people, atheism is simply the rejection of somebody sitting on a cloud somewhere with a beard who might intervene from time to time. I think quantum physics, the little I know, it just intuiti…

Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

By Joseph Laycock

…ld, some of which have never been published before. I’m excited about it. It’s basically the demonological equivalent of a music nerd who wants to show you obscure tracts from their record collection. Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about your book? If you buy the book, cut out the correct pages using the Fibonacci sequence, and lay them out on the floor in the shape of a pentagram, it will reveal a secret code allowing you t…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…But what CNN really meant was “When asked by a complete stranger, over the phone, to define their spiritual lives in a single phrase, one-third of those adults who responded to this poll (response rate: one in ten), and who fall within an arbitrarily-defined generational frame, declined to tell the aforementioned complete stranger that they were affiliated with any specific religious group.” These are not equivalent statements. For some reason, th…