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Does the Science Show that Spirituality Will Benefit Your Child?

By Michael Schulson

…isky sex in girls. It’s 40% protective against substance abuse in kids, as compared to someone who’s just average. A highly spiritual kid, as compared to someone who doesn’t feel any spirituality at all, is 80% protected against substance abuse. There’s nothing like this in the epidemiological or clinical research. It’s jaw dropping. And it drove me nuts, as a parent, that I didn’t see other parents benefiting from this. I could see it clear as da…

Dear Lindsay Lohan, I’m Sorry

By Haroon Moghul

…tian version of the propagandistic hate, from language to technique, I see coming from the worst corners of the Muslim world. They’re the Mean Girls of our global high school. They deserve one another. But they’re not the adults in the room. So what if you carried a Qur’an? (Actually, I’m happy, but that’s just the small proselyte I have inside of me—think of him as a genie inside a lamp. Plus, that’s not racist, or anthropological. It’s xenobiolo…

The Glorious, Ethnically-Challenged, Sisterhood of Spy

By Haroon Moghul

…nfidelity. In an age when there is no higher value than being open-minded, comedy might be the most politically subversive means to any end. Cartoons are blasphemy, comics are pundits. And don’t let any of this suggest to you, for one moment, that you won’t enjoy watching a genuinely hilarious, goofy, and tender movie. As for the plot itself, it’s simple. McCarthy’s CIA analyst Susan Cooper is bureaucratic wallpaper given an opportunity to come to…

Terror In South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…ow what happened to Walter Scott is because a bystander filmed it with his phone. In making his plea, Pinckney invoked the biblical story of Doubting Thomas, the one of Jesus’s disciples who would not believe Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw him with his own eyes and touched his wounds with his own hands. “It was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe,’” Pinckney said of Thomas. Some people, said Pinckney, are like Thomas…

The Sacred and the Dead: Ten Writers on the End of an American Adventure

By The Editors

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. #5 : Three Ways to American Beauty by Aaron K. Kerr At the height of secular modernity, when Catholics were openi…

Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…nderstandings of why incidents like the Heaven’s Gate suicide happen. Dark comedies about cults often suggest that committing mass suicide is simply “what cults do” and that no external factors influence this decision. However, scholars like Catherine Wessinger and David Bromley have shown that these movements generally engage in violence only when outside pressures have caused them to feel they have no other option. Jones says his film will portr…

Gay, Christian, Pagan, Artist: How Matt Morris Defies the Borders of Spiritual Identity

By Jesse James DeConto

…just be a Quaker and never knew it. Isn’t this sense of constant motion becoming more and more common as our experience of spirituality? Maybe you can trace it to the condition of the modern church. Or maybe there’s a way to look at it more generously and less fearfully. Sometimes when the leaders of denominations look at that, there’s the sense that this is troublesome, that people are perhaps unwilling to maintain a religious identity or a cons…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…privilege and/or racial injustice? Then we have to figure out how we can become a white ally. Becoming a white ally is about choosing to engage in both the intentional dismantling of white privilege and the active creation of a just redistribution of wealth commensurate with gospel values and consistent with a commitment a vision of racial equality those values call for. This is the harder challenge. Assuming our efforts engender a broader and dee…

Satanic FOIA Reveals Deep Confusion About 1st Amendment

By Joseph Laycock

…y to block the Satanic monument was to also remove the monument to the Ten Commandments. But virtually all of the messages were opposed to the monument, ranging in tone from bewilderment to anger to tears. What they shared was a complete lack of understanding of the establishment clause or its implications for government institutions—not to mention a staggering level of confusion. Several callers demanded to know whether the governor was for or ag…

Black Masses Continue to Titillate Conservative Catholics

By Joseph Laycock

…cedented attention. Mayor Mick Cornett has already received 450 emails and phone calls opposing the event. Archbishop Paul Coakley has also condemned the event and called on Catholics to protest if it moves forward. Daniels, naturally, has expressed delight that his antics are finally provoking Church officials. This newfound energy has nothing to do with Daniels and everything to do with the events of last May. An online petition features footage…