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Mormons Prepare for WA Marriage Equality Fight

By Joanna Brooks

…asked them if the LDS Church was getting involved, and the staffer on the phone said, “We’re meeting with church leaders right this minute; they’re at lunch with Focus on the Family and [National Organization for Marriage-sponsored] Preserve Marriage Washington.” To this day, we don’t know whether it was local or general church leaders who met with Preserve Marriage Washington—we believe they were local leaders. But a reporter for the Boston Glob…

The Fragility of Our Reality: A Conversation with the Brain Behind PBS Miniseries on Neuroscience

By Michael Schulson

…, to a large extent, unmapped: the terra incognita in our skulls. Over the phone, Eagleman spoke with The Cubit about traumatic brain injuries, the idea of possibilianism, and the language we use to describe our brains. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. In The Brain, you do a good job of depicting the fragility of our experience of reality. Am I right to be a little scared by this instability? [Laughs] Well, you know, it’s one…

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

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…Christ I don’t see any other place in our society to do so. I work to transform the church. I don’t work to get rid of the church. I work to transform the meaning of what it means to be a Christian, not to get rid of that meaning. In this book, you chose to explore only the gospel of Matthew, which you say, along with the other synoptic gospels of Mark and Luke, is really a liturgical writing that was used by the original followers of Jesus. Expl…

Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…ngeance: the desire to confront provocations Religion, he argues, is successful when it serves all of these needs. Naturally, I was skeptical. Do we really need another theory of religion based on universal human needs? And how, given the diversity of human history and culture, could Reiss claim to have found one core set of desires that apply across all time and space? When the Cubit recently reached out to Dr. Reiss for a phone interview, though…

Reporting from Paris: A Prayer for Polluters

By Donna Schaper

…e a caucus proposed a stop fracking resolution. We spent hours on national phone calls debating when fracking should be stopped. We finally proposed 2030 as the last fracking date. It was a compromise after many “brackets,” what COP21 calls the matters that are kept in that famous parking lot where we put the things we don’t know how to decide. The Synod amended our so-called radical proposal and unanimously passed 2017 as the final date. We were…

Refusing Religion, Claiming the Future: A Roundtable Discussion on “The Nones Are Alright”

By Peter Laarman

…in the nation. So, even though black youth may be expressing their dissatisfaction with the orthodoxies and dysfunction of the black church, they are not, by and large, abandoning these traditions wholesale. This has a lot to do with the role the black church—for good or for ill—continues to play in segregated African-American communities vis-à-vis social welfare, cultural cohesion, political engagement and educational opportunity (i.e., providin…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…performed and witnessed through cameras, at a distance of hundreds or thousands of miles. Veteran suicides come to outnumber battlefield deaths. Violence shifts even deeper into the realm of psychology: there’s the pervasive fear of a possible strike, existing alongside the lasting legacy of combat. The final chapters of the Hunger Games series concern themselves with trauma and its aftermath, in unusually naked terms (“I still remain struck with…

“We Blew it” on Climate Change, But May Survive Anyway: An RD Discussion with the First Transhumanist Candidate

By Andrew Aghapour

…tical point of view that we would be the only ones. There are probably thousands and thousands of other life forms far more advanced than us in the universe just given the sheer numbers. Given how close we are to developing artificial intelligence right now, it’s also easy to think that another species did that on a planet somewhere far away and changed the universe. Given the fact that we’ll have A.I. in two hundred years that will potentially be…

The Only Religion Question Reporters and Debate Moderators Should Ask Presidential Candidates (Kim Davis Edition)

By Sarah Posner

…for shying away from hot-button religious culture war battles, “visited by phone” with Rowan County, Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis yesterday, according to a statement issued by his campaign. “I let her know how proud I am of her for not abandoning her religious convictions and standing strong for religious liberty,” the former pastor, Arkansas governor, and now two-time presidential candidate said in a statement. Arguing that “the Supreme Court c…

Kendrick Lamar’s Hip-Hop Jeremiad

By Josiah Daniels

…, “lament is the language of suffering.” Kendrick wants to “get God on the phone” but, just as in the Book of Lamentations, God remains silent. But that doesn’t stop Kendrick from baring his soul, Why you wanna see a good man with a broken heart? Once upon a time I used to go to church and talk to God Now I’m thinkin’ to myself, hollow tips is all I got There’s nothing quite as audacious as calling God a liar or suggesting that communing with this…