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Who Benefits From Standardized Universal Time? And Other Questions to Ask As You Set Your Clocks Back This Weekend

By Michael Schulson

…spite the best efforts of business leaders and other reformers in the early 1900s, who wanted a year of 13 evenly spaced months, we still use the idiosyncratic Gregorian calendar, enacted by a 16th century Pope. “The global history of time reform shows how uneven, slow, and full of unintended consequences interconnectedness was,” writes Ogle. She may be overstating the case a bit: time reform was not a perfect, triumphal march for Universal Progre…

Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

By Haroon Moghul

…gions. How did Muslims respond to abolition, which mostly took place in the 19thcentury—as it did here in the U.S.? Interestingly, Mattson cited two objections to abolition. Traditionalists were not against the idea of blanket manumission per se, but they either argued that the Shari’ah offered no mechanism to effect such a decision, or that “our slavery is not like American slavery”—a fascinating indication of the interconnectedness of the world—…

‘Let It Be Unto Me’: Akin, Rape, and the Early Church

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…pretive chasm” separating two versions of the same story; the first told in 1752 and the second in 1836. A monk is told to keep watch over the body of a girl whose family believes has recently died, but instead forces himself upon her sexually. In the morning, it turns out that she is not dead, but was just in a coma. In due course it becomes clear that she is pregnant. In the 1752 version it is assumed that the monk must have known she was alive,…

Bright-Sided Recalls Mark Twain’s Travails

By Michael A. Elliott

…from Eddy’s teaching that “there is no material world, only Thought, Mind, Spirit, Goodness, Love” to contemporary motivational coaches who preach a similar “mystical notion”: “the world is dissolved in Mind, Energy, and vibrations, all of which are potentially subject to our conscious control.” In both cases, the right kind of thinking is good for what ails you. Near the end of his career, Twain himself wrote a series of articles on Eddy and her…

Netflix’s Carlton Pearson Biopic, “Come Sunday,” Reveals Christianity’s Struggle for its Soul

By Peter Laarman

…Global South—the descendants of people who were “saved” through the work of 19th century European and North American missionaries—from the descendants of those very same missionaries who no longer find it possible to believe that God hates gays. It’s a drama that is literally tearing apart some of the world’s best-known international communions—Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, even Roman Catholics. Come Sunday is at its most compelling when it sh…

Unauthorized Catholic Immigrants will Renew a Christian America, Archbishop Says

By Marie Friedmann Marquardt

…e a special duty today to be the guardians of the truth about the American spirit and our national identity.” In fact, Archbishop Gomez argues, immigrant Catholics “without proper documentation,” who share the values of “faith, family, and community” are “the key to American renewal.” Yes, Archbishop Gomez is arguing that unauthorized immigrants not only deserve the chance to adjust their status to live legally in the United States, but also hold…

Blessed With a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch’s Spiritual Strivings

By Paul Harvey

…expectation from the traditional “silver dagger” song that this is perhaps 1909 or 1939, but certainly not within our lifetime). Whatever it was that happened, it could not have been entirely pretty: Seems every castle is made of sand The Great Destroyer sleeps in every man Here comes my baby, here comes my man With the silver dagger in his hand. And how can all these stories of barroom girls, morphine addicts, rape victims, murdering ghosts, and…

The “Nones” Are Here… And Have Been for Over 100 Years

By Emily Mace

…aditions. One such movement was the Society for Ethical Culture, founded in 1876 by Felix Adler, a Reform Jew who created a post-Jewish religion of “deed rather than creed.” The Sunday morning meetings of the original New York Society for Ethical Culture included music and a spoken address. Membership drew from the upper echelons of New York society, including many prominent Jewish leaders. Adler’s reason for holding such ritualistically bare serv…

No Buddhists in Washington?

By Danny Fisher

…gs between scientists and Buddhists. In 2005, for example, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet was invited by the Stanford University School of Medicine to dialogue with a panel of distinguished neuroscientists. In short, Buddhist Americans and their work should not be overlooked. Indeed, how helpful a Buddhist representative might be on something like the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships! One hopes t…

Ryan-DeLauro’s Common Ground on Abortion is in Religious Territory

By Sarah Posner

…contentious issues like abortion and gay rights. It endorsed (at least in spirit) the then-existing version of the Ryan-DeLauro bill, and touted the blessing of evangelical figures who said they were rejecting the single-issue, rancorous politics of their religious right brethren. They would, they pledged, abandon the trench warfare of Roe v. Wade, and instead try to find practical solutions for reducing abortions. Stigmatizing Abortion? The relu…