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The Religious Reason Many Americans Refuse to Wear Masks

By Kate Blanchard

…ere inspired by Mark’s gospel (the wackiest of gospels, full of high-drama spirit possessions and demon warfare) to prove their faith in God by “taking up serpents,” or even drinking poison. Doing these dangerous things was—and still is—a way of being fearless, being willing to risk great sacrifice, making room for “signs and wonders” by giving themselves over wholly to God’s control. Some of these folks perish as a result, but more of them live t…

Progressive Christian: Wallis “No Longer Speaks for Us”

By Sarah Posner

…tion is to avoid taking sides on this issue” — reducing a family seeking a spiritual community to “an issue” and needlessly politicizing the call for a pastoral response. It is deeply dehumanizing to gay and lesbian families and antithetical to protecting the safety and dignity of all people Sojourners claims to advocate. UPDATE #4 (5/10/11): In an open letter to Sojourners posted on her blog, Julie Kennedy, a pk (preacher’s kid, for the uninitiat…

The Children of Bellow and Roth: New Book of Short Fiction Takes On the Male Jewish Experience

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

…who left Poland right before the Holocaust, dies. He is taken over by her spirit and can suddenly speak Polish and Yiddish. Is there a shift in American Jewish identity as we get to a point where the last of the Holocaust survivors are dying or have died, and there are fewer connections to the people who fled Europe? That’s probably the most Jewish story, obviously. I wasn’t really conscious about it when I was writing, but after I was like, oh t…

RDPulpit: Evangelical Manifesto, the “Chamomile Tea” of Theologies

By Daniel Schultz

…o partisan politics, it can be bought and sold like stocks, simultaneously cheapening the faith and corrupting the secular principles of liberal government. Addressed to every faith community in the United States, the Evangelical Manifesto is a warning American Muslims should heed. To be accepted as full members of a liberal polity, they have to be prepared to accept that their profession of faith is just one feature of their identities among many…

Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

By Gillian Frank

…merely performing God’s will in an ongoing war against sin.” It was in the spirit of purging impurities from the public sphere that he, and the anti-vice organizations he collaborated with, confiscated and burned thousands upon thousands of books and persecuted authors and vendors. These censorious actions were points of pride in the 19th century, so much so that they were emblazoned on the emblem of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vic…

The Transfiguration of the Fanboy: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, The Conclusion

By Mark Dery

…n of kenosis, the emptying out of the self to make room for the indwelling spirit of God. To the devout, the blurry apparitions of the messiah on Veronica’s Veil and the Shroud of Turin are palpable evidence of Christ’s historical reality and of his divinity. But they can also be read backwards, as visual metaphors for the shadow of a doubt that haunts all fandom: He’s not really here, at least not in the way you think he is. It’s all in your head…

Prosperity Preachers: Where Are They Now?

By Jonathan L. Walton

…hat difficult economic times signify a lack of faith at best, and a sinful spirit at worst? So where are they now? Where are these preachers as parishioners’ mortgages continue to default and gas prices bust the average working family’s budget? Where are they as families fall into an economic tailspin due to unforeseen job losses and out of control healthcare costs? And where are they as parishioners increasingly discover that the extravagant luxu…

Dinos and Demons and Swedes, Oh My! It May Be Cartoonish, but Evangelical Radicalism Isn’t Just a Sideshow

By Chrissy Stroop

…ldviews using human reason, but that our safest bet is to rely on the Holy Spirit and an essentially literal reading of the Bible for our understanding of truth. Christian presuppositionalists also argue that there can be no neutrality among competing worldviews, which is what allows them to so casually denounce points of view to which they are ideologically opposed, like environmentalism, as another “religion.” And they are quite explicit about s…

V-Day: An Arrow in the Heart

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…Many a Romantic artist has said the same: the self must clear out for the spirit of creativity to enter. Loss of self is perceived as fulfillment of self. Now enter the lover in love, long venerated by poets and rhapsodes of all stripes, starting with the lyrical Lesbian, Sappho herself. The lover who tries to leave reason in control, she warns, does not follow her god to the end. It is the very chaos of love, the swirl of love, that may link our…

Equally Blessed: Wear a Rainbow Ribbon to Mass

By Alex McNeill

…h is being manifested, they are going to miss the boat. I believe the Holy Spirit is speaking among the lay people of the church and the Bishops who are not discerning that call, and are not listening to that voice, to their detriment. I think the illogical statements that bishops make about LGBT people and issues cause Catholic people to question bishops’ moral authority, not only on that issue but on other issues as well. We saw with birth contr…