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Decolonizing Jewish Studies Part II: A Response to the Backlash

By Gilah Kletenik and Rafael Rachel Neis

…in a bias for the contemporary or immediate past. We have no quarrel with American Jewish Studies or the study of contemporary Jews and Jewishness, in and of themselves. We commend shifts to heterogeneous subjects and methods, especially those informed by sociological theory and critical ethnography that critique inherited methods and introduce alternatives. Still, the overpromotion of the contemporary deleteriously affects adjacent subfields. Fe…

Should Christians Confess to Plants? A Cranky Meditation

By Greg Carey

…t to participate. If liturgy asks people to pray or sing things that raise reservations, they find themselves in a quandary. It feels wrong to participate, and it feels equally problematic to refrain. Although I very much appreciate innovative worship, I have experienced this situation too many times. To be sure, I feel uncomfortable with worship every week. I’m asked to affirm things I desire to believe when the truth is that I carry doubts and r…

Guns and Babies: What Newtown Does NOT Teach Us

By Anthea Butler

…aura of fear that makes all of us uneasy and unstable. Our moral core, our American Exceptionalism is not about freedom—it’s about violence. We’ve anointed the Second Amendment as sacred scripture and a charter of freedom: the right to bear arms, so that we can kill. We are a vicious, violent nation. And these days it’s our violence most of all that makes us stand out. Americans must begin to assess our humanity, and view each other as human being…

Protest Greets the Honoring of Rev. H. Eddie Fox at Emory’s Candler School of Theology

By John Blevins

…ageous and to decide if it is willing and able to accept LGBT folk without reservation so that our voices might actually be heard in these seemingly endless conversations that are part of the Church today. It’s time for Emory University to clarify the tension between its own non-discrimination policy and that of the United Methodist Church. And when Candler decides to come down on the side of honoring denominational policy in violation of universi…

Will Internet Kill Mormonism Too? Or Just Missionaries?

By Holly Welker

…ch to missionaries to investigators, I’ll give it a cautious thumbs up. My reservation is that I worry about the effects of this approach to missionary work on the missionaries. The article mentions that missionaries spend “11 hours a day, six days at a stretch” in front of a computer. Given that sitting is supposedly the new smoking, I see this as a very serious health threat for the 18- to 21-year-olds who constitute the bulk of the missionary f…

Again, Vatican Punishes Gender Equality More Swiftly Than Sexual Abuse

By Patricia Miller

…confirmed in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, that the “reservation of the priesthood to males…is not a question open to discussion.” Writing in The Week, Damon Linker predicts a “mass exodus” from the Catholic Church if it doesn’t revise the “stunningly unpersuasive” ban on women’s ordination: American Catholics have become accustomed to worshipping in a state of cognitive dissonance, with a majority rejecting the church’s sexu…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…er of languages, economic classes, ethnicities and cultures represented in American Catholic churches, American Catholics resist singularity. And it follows that they are going to be inconsistent in how they define mercy, as the hierarchy of the American church is often wont to demonstrate. Even the variety of American “Mercy Doors” found online defies comparison to the huge, ornately carved bass doors Francis pushed open at St. Peter’s when he de…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…t Atheists and Agnostics are not readily blended populations. Finally, the numbers in the Pew report obscure an understanding of American religiosity as it is expressed in practice—that is, as people do religion or spirituality rather than as they believe. While the researchers marked practice in the conventional categories of worship attendance and prayer, other practices that my research has suggested are religiously or spiritually meaningful to…