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Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…claim that what they called religion simply didn’t count. Enter psychologist Steven Reiss’ new book: The 16 Strivings for God: The New Psychology of Religious Experiences. There isn’t just one fundamental desire behind religion, Reiss argues, there are sixteen of them. According to Reiss, all humans have the following innate desires: – Acceptance: the desire for positive self-regard – Curiosity: the desire for understanding – Eating: the desire f…

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ppening and this means the Kingdom of God is coming in, then John the Baptist can still be the forerunner announcing that the Kingdom of God is at hand. That’s why Matthew is 40% longer than Mark because he goes through the whole year. That’s the first clue I received from my mentor Michael Gouder who saw that Mark wrote his gospel with Jesus stories to carry the community from Rosh Hashanah to Passover, then he began to look at the Jewish festiva…

Terror In South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…Emanuel, like other black churches, has been the target of violence, not just last night, but throughout its history. In an excellent essay at TPM, Benjamin Park writes about how black churches have long “served as a flashpoint for hatred from those who fear black solidarity, and as a result these edifices have been the location for many of our nation’s most egregious racial terrorist acts.” In 1822, one of Emanuel’s founders, Denmark Vesey, was o…

How (and Why) A Determined Sit-In Worked

By Daniel Schultz

…ctly in the trash. They pay more attention to phone calls and letters, but street protests don’t bother them at all, unless they’re on cable news, which they almost never are. Hashtags? Changing your Twitter avatar? Forget about it. Popular protest does play a supporting role in getting us to a point where something like the Congressional sit-in works. So do the organizations—including the religious groups—who sponsor it. There has to be an entire…

Alabama’s IVF Ruling Reveals Deep Ties to This Increasingly Influential Christian Right Movement

By Annika Brockschmidt

…d. In fact, a bipartisan bill to protect IVF was passed overwhelmingly by the Alabama legislature, though it’s just a temporary measure. But any notion that the GOP is broadly supportive of IVF shouldn’t be taken seriously—Republicans just stopped a bill introduced by Democrats that would have established federal protections for IVF. Their goal remains the same: To end bodily autonomy for women and pregnant people, and to impose a Christian, patri…

United Methodists Elect 1st Gay Bishop; Canadian Anglicans OK Same-Sex Marriage

By Peter Montgomery

…ity: Some countries where authorities have used forced anal exams in the past, most notably Lebanon, have taken steps to end the practice. But others, including Egypt and Tunisia, rely on them with great frequency in prosecutions for consensual same-sex conduct. The use of forced anal examinations appears to be a recent phenomenon in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. United Methodist Church: First openly gay bishop elected; schism ahead? The Western Divi…

How Do We Break the Cycle of Religious Violence in South Asia?

By Sunita Viswanath

…ing placed on an image of a Hindu deity. To some Muslims, this offensive post justified attacks on Hindu shops, temples, and homes across Bangladesh. The violence didn’t stop here, though. In the neighboring Indian state of Tripura, Hindu extremist groups protesting the Bangladesh violence engaged in retaliatory attacks on the state’s Muslim minority. Sadly, it’s all too common for religious violence in South Asia to be spurred by incidents of “re…

Evangelicalism “Wasn’t Created for Someone Like Me”: Following a Queer Evangelical of Color in the Age of Trump

By Deborah Jian Lee

…ay I can survive this desert. *** NOVEMBER 2017 What’s happened since we last spoke? I stopped attending services in March. I know you wrote about how I walked out of a service. Well, that kept happening. Eventually you realize you’re spending more of Sunday walking out than you are sitting in your seat and it’s time to consider taking a break from church. Where are you now? Have you left your church completely? I moved to Michigan. Part of moving…

The Forgotten Nones: The High Cost of Fleeing Fundamentalist Religion

By Andreea Nica

…and when I stopped going to church, my Christian friendships stopped. I just stopped hearing from them, and it was as if I did not exist at all. I lost most of my friends, and that was extremely painful. I realized that the friendships, based on deep spiritual experiences together, had no foundation like a normal friendship did…I was able to come out to friends who had also left their faith, and we were able to create an actual friendship based o…

But ‘Natural’ is Better, No? ‘How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science’

By Andrew Aghapour

…ing as a unity of the virtues when it comes to food. The vanilla that is most sustainable might also put vanilla farmers in Madagascar out of business. The vanilla that is closest to its “natural” form (not in Madagascar, which is not its native environment) might be very expensive and unaffordable to people. There’s a real reluctance to own these kinds of tradeoffs, but I think it’s incredibly important with food to realize that perhaps what’s be…