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Noah, Cosmos Controversies Not About Biblical Literalism

By Dan Mathewson

…o Fosdick, as Christians had always done in the past when they encountered new truths. “The new knowledge and the old faith [have] to be blended in a new combination,” Fosdick argued in his famous 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”—a new combination that for Fosdick demanded a Christianity without a virgin birth or literal second coming of Christ (among other things), which, he argued, were impossible to believe in, in this new scientif…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…public offering. In doing so, SoulCycle is gambling that people outside of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (which, together, account for 95% of SoulCycle’s revenue) will be willing to drop $30+ in order to pedal in unison with strangers, listening to messages of empowerment, growth, and self-actualization. But SoulCycle is also part of a larger gamble: namely, that Americans will be willing to meld the forms of spirituality and the forms…

From Empire to Shire: Rod Dreher’s Nostalgia for Middle-Earth

By Gustavo Maya

…formers. We might add John Milton to the list. With the “discovery” of the new world came the division of lands and the extension of European authority over the natives. The Church allowed Catholic monarchs to colonize the Americas under the guise of “evangelism.” From there we might discuss the spread of the British Empire to the Americas, the founding of the colonies, and the arrival of religious dissenters. We might mention the Declaration of I…

A Time to Break Down, and A Time to Build Up: Reinventing Ministry in Post-Katrina New Orleans

By Ellen Blue

…st-Katrina New Orleans Ellen Blue Wipf & Stock August 4, 2016 My heart was breaking, too, since New Orleans is my home. My son was in the city as a first responder during the storm, and his family’s home had to be bulldozed. The fear and grief were very personal for me. Yet living and teaching in Tulsa gave me the distance that allowed some level of objectivity that UMC people living in south Louisiana couldn’t hope to achieve. It was clear this b…

Marriage Debate in Australia Shifts To Push For Religious Exemptions; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…a Romanian man seeking legal residency for his American husband, which the New York Times’ Kit Gillet says “will have major implications for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships across Europe.” Coman and his American partner were married in Belgium in 2010 but “the authorities in Bucharest refused to recognize their relationship for the purposes of residency.” As we have reported previously, U.S.-based religious conservative groups like…

Beloved Immortals: Science, Miracles and ‘Jellyfish Time’

By Beatrice Marovich

…ng. The novelist Nathaniel Rich recently published a charming story in the New York Times about one such scientist. Japanese researcher Shin Kubota, Rich tells us, is the only scientist who maintains a captive population of the jelly called Turritopsis dohrnii, also known as the “immortal medusa” or, more simply, the “immortal jellyfish.” This species is able to—crudely speaking—reverse the aging process, returning to its earliest stage of develop…

Are They Jewish Bones? Battle for Separation of Synagogue & State in Israel

By Shalom Goldman

…tablishment’ of the Chief Rabbinate. The editors of the English-language Jerusalem Post, known for their support of the current government—and of earlier governments of the Israeli Right—seemed to echo opposition leader’s Tzipi Livni’s sentiments when they wrote on March 29 that “the time has come to do away with the Chief Rabbinate. This is the only conclusion any clear-headed observer, concerned about the way Judaism is being represented in the…

High Holidays Watch: Seth Rogen’s Latest Highlights the ‘American Pickle’ of Living with Death

By Shaul Magid

…or more precisely the way we become totally absorbed in it and the way we live our lives avoiding it. Like you, every day I’m inundated with death counts occupying the top right corner of almost every news screen. It reminds me of listening, as a young adolescent, to the nightly news in the early 1970s as the anchor duly reported the number of US soldiers killed in Vietnam. After a while we became numb to the numbers. We bantered during the repor…

To Let It Go and So To Find A Way: U2, (A)Live with Grief and Grace

By Cathleen Falsani

…y far too often this season. Bono narrowly escaped a bicycling accident in New York’s Central Park last November with his life (thank God for helmets) and may never play guitar again because of the damage done to his left arm during the crash. It was a hard-won physical rehabilitation that got the lead singer ready to return to the stage for the launch of the “Innocence + Experience” tour in Canada on May 14. Then, just a few days before the tour…

Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

By Michael Bronski

…Islam’s holy book, the Quran, where the story of Lot’s people and the destruction of Sodom appears five times. Islamic commentaries from the medieval period show a diversity of scholarly and legal views about the precise “sin” of Sodom, although the interpretation that became dominant identifies it with male-male anal sex. Under Sharia, or Islamic law, same-sex sexual acts were early on condemned, especially anal sex between men. But Islamic juri…