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The Episcopal Church ‘Takes a Flying Leap’ into Controversies Old and New

By Elizabeth Drescher

…’ can be vague when we want to not have to deal with something, and it was really important to be specific.” “In sharing our stories,” said Partridge, who testified with a number of transgender Episcopalians and their advocates before the deputies and bishops, “we were really trying to be very specific” about the experiences of transgender people in the Church. This experience, he said, “is something that we really need to name at this time in the…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…e a kind of creation of which we’re no longer capable? The Gospels weren’t really written in the way that we think of writing. Luke wasn’t a guy who sat down and said, “I think I’ll write a Gospel.” They really were functions of a community, designed for its specific needs. The whole notion of the individual author, writing for an anonymous audience—which is how one writes today—is not what writing was. I can’t imagine a writer having that relatio…

Refusal of Interracial Couple Shows How Slippery the Slope of LGBTQ Refusal Really Is

By Heron Greenesmith

…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ldless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are named chairs in universities. The number of women in the sociology of religion who hold tenure track jobs, earn tenure, get published, and get cited is not changing as fast as we would expect, giving that we are seeing gender parity in terms of who earns a graduate degree. There are conver…

Religious Kids Are More Selfish: The Stickers Don’t Lie

By Michael Schulson

…holars of religion are fond of explaining all the reasons that religion is really, really difficult to define. The more cynical among us might point out that, in a crowded job market, academics distinguish themselves by explaining why everyone else’s categories are wrong, meaning that religion scholars have a strong incentive to expound, at length, about all the reasons that religion is really, really difficult to define. But, look: they have a po…

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

By Scott Blaine Swenson

…gn of the Beast” in Topeka 666 is still a little unnerving, there are differing opinions about the number’s translation. Some theologians suggest the number should really be 616, in which case, all eyes on Peoria, Illinois….

Aliens, Nanobots, & Microbes: The Science of Secular Apocalypse

By Michael Schulson

…gree at all. My response to that would be the accessibility aspect is what really differentiates nuclear technology from some of the other stuff. Uranium and plutonium is really hard to get. Fair point. It’s easier to regulate nuclear power, because it’s easier to cut it off at the source. Right. Unlike, say, synthetic microbes that people may one day be able to make using widely available tools. You’d probably need even more intrusive surveillanc…

Politics in a Fallen World: Lying, Fact-Checkers, and the Future of Civilization

By Michael Schulson

…icular lie. The issue of determining if what someone said is a lie doesn’t really come up as an issue in ethical discussions, for the most part, in that whole tradition. It’s really about the moral problem with lying. And the moral problem was this deep religious one, connected to everything awful in society. The theological tradition says if we ever said lies were okay, civil society simply couldn’t function, because you would not know when anyon…

Fr. John Dear, Dismissed from Jesuits: “It Is So Strange to Be Hated by So Many Church Leaders”

By Megan Sweas

…0 times a day. Forgiving someone seven times a day is a lot. You think, “I really forgive that person,” and then later at noon, “I really forgive that person,” and then at 2 o’clock, and then Jesus says do it 500 times a day! This is how serious this journey is. Then you will be able to forgive your killers. Yes, I am learning to forgive everyone who ever hurt me, including church leaders. I keep saying every day that I forgive everyone who has ev…