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New Research Suggests That Belief in Demons May Help Explain Christian Support of Trump

By Robert Repino

…came across the book in 2001, and had no idea that this schlocky, paint-by-numbers thriller had sold millions of copies and helped create the modern evangelical worldview. What I envy, to a degree, is the way in which this book must have made its readers feel, at least for a while. Whereas the later, and even more popular, Left Behind series issues a threat about the end times, Darkness makes an enticing promise: no matter how powerless a person m…

Mormon Voters Help Recall Russell Pearce

By Joanna Brooks

Last night, Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce—author of the controversial and now infamous anti-immigration bill SB 1070—became the first sitting lawmaker in Arizona history to lose his seat in a recall election, in a closely fought contest that divided Mesa, Arizona’s strong LDS community between Pearce, who is Mormon, and his challenger Jerry Lewis, who is also a Mormon Republican. Lewis beat Pearce 53% to 46%. The Mormon grapevine was abuzz…

Science of Little Help with Personhood Issues

By Paul Wallace

Yesterday at Real Clear Religion, Jeffery Weiss made a simple but brilliant observation: The public arguments—both pro and con—over the personhood amendment voted down this week in Mississippi were clothed in the language of science. Science, that is, which is uniquely unqualified to define the term “person.” Writes Weiss, “Both sides claimed that science was on their side, when there is really very little that science can offer about the questio…

Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

By Bruce Ledewitz

…ous and nonreligious folks to share useful perspectives. There have been a number of such initiatives in recent years. For example, the Clergy Letter Project annually organizes Evolution Weekend in which sermons are preached and events held in thousands of religious congregations across the country. The National Academy of Sciences came out with a paper a few years ago that underscored the compatibility of faith and science; and the National Cente…

A Story in Which the Gay Mormon Does Not Die

By Joanna Brooks

…ly confessed it, to citizens who turned a blind eye when she cried out for help at the local McDonald’s or tried to run away at the grocery store. But at almost every turn of her difficult journey, Alex also found outstanding grassroots Mormon people who took her in, helped her, and shared with her their own personal beliefs—beliefs that often diverged from the Church’s official position on homosexuality. Saving Alex is full of grassroots Mormon h…

Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…’d argue, queer- and trans-liberation) has the ability to save Judaism, to help it return to our highest ideals. Religion can and should help us to live our greatest aspirations, and any time that it fails to help us, individually and as a community, live out our potential in the greatest possible way, it fails us. Feminism has asked vitally important questions of Judaism and Jewish life, and its ability to respond to those questions has helped it…

Christians Should Give Up “Christianity”: An Interview with Peter Rollins

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ing. If you believe the world is meaningful but you don’t love, you cannot help but experience the world as meaningless. If you think the world is meaningless, but you are in love with life or with a person, you can’t help but experience the world as utterly meaningful. That’s faith for me—a material enactment of the beauty and depth of life. In America, faith has come to mean cognitive belief in something that lacks sufficient evidence. So, I can…

Raising Children the Right Way

By Jeffrey Feldman

…e that campaign has yet to fully begin, the “common good” frame will again help us to see that how our individual behavior results in carbon emissions. With innovations in technology and public service narratives to help us understand the best way to act in the interest of the common good, we will learn to manage this newest aspect of pollution. As we can see, the “common good” frame informs the entire environmental discussion—past, present, and f…

How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

By Eric C. Miller

…erful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my goal as writing the history of the present, telling the story of how gratitude came to be so clo…

Toward a Literature of Abuse

By Donna Freitas

…hat if my mother were still alive, I’d probably be at home in Rhode Island helping her with the annual survival kit-making event in my family. My Mom was a nursery school teacher and every year she made these parent survival kits, which were a series of symbolic items she’d place inside a paper lunch bag, designed to help parents manage this transition of seeing their little three-year-old kids go off to school for the first time (the parents used…