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More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…porting lesbian and gay relationships as was once thought by many. But his call to new cardinals to reach out to the marginalized can be thought of as making it possible for church leaders to initiate much greater outreach to LGBT people than they have been doing. UK: Church of England wrestles with rifts; evangelicals abandoning Tories Evangelical Alliance, a group that claims to represent up to 2 million evangelical Christians, said that a surve…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…ists weren’t allowed to serve on a US jury. Women are dying of AIDS in Africa because condoms make baby Jesus sad. In Utah, 45% of homeless teenagers are Mormons. Female genital mutilation. A famous comic book artist she knows was told that he wouldn’t be able to draw in heaven. “I’ve touched on 1/100 of the things about religion that piss me off,” Christina says. (I wonder if she’s pissed off to have the last name Christina; that would make me…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…was caught after the murder, fleeing halfway across the state, he had the phone number of an Operation Rescue leader on his dashboard—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broader connections he’d built with anti-abortion extremists. The church, Roeder would later testify, emerged as the only place he could find a shot at Tiller, around the elaborate security measures the doctor had learned to follow at his clinic and home. “Justifiable homicide…

Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

By Lauri Lebo

…’s roots are in the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. A religious and political campaign, the movement provided safe havens for Central American refugees fleeing civil conflict in response to restrictive federal immigration policies that made obtaining asylum difficult for Central Americans. More than 500 churches eventually declared themselves official “sanctuaries” and provided food and shelter to refugees in defiance of federal law. Various deno…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…n, it falls short on critique. The latest ambitions of modern militarism escape unscathed. To its credit, this means the book could be read as profitably at West Point as at the War Resisters League. Yet in the sequence of Bousquet’s scientific regimes—from the mechanistic, to the thermodynamic, to the cybernetic, to the chaoplexic—no logic of warfare lives up to its promises, and each comes bearing terrible, unexpected consequences. The sensation…

Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…e powerful are served by a desperate attempt to return to “normal,” to advocate what they call “peace.” Because we are not at peace, nor should we be, given the divergent interests at play. “Normal” is what led to this situation in the first place. Healing doesn’t entail hiding from this reality, and any call to “come together” that seeks to soft-pedal the challenges facing this country in the immediate future—regarding the prison industrial compl…

“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…then it has to begin by tackling the question of land. Swampy, virgin, and cheap Canadians who tell stories about land in a public setting can no longer do so while ignoring that they (we) are treaty people—that Canadians live in nation-to-nation relations with Indigenous peoples. As treaty people, part of the responsibility of settlers is to know and tell stories that acknowledge Indigenous land is the very same territory that they also call home…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…e, even to the point of fallacy. At one point Langdon is rescued by an African-American man who is a thirty-third degree Mason of the Scottish Rite and a lodge brother of Peter Solomon, which is highly unlikely. American Freemasonry, including the Scottish Rite, has always been unofficially segregated. In the 1780s, Prince Hall, a black Bostonian, was initiated by some Irish soldiers. The white lodges in Boston refused to accept him, so he formed…

Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

By Peter Laarman

…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…

Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…tween the bunnies-and-eggs version of Easter, and the church-service version. Merchandisers are wise to define Easter by marshmallow chicks and colorful baskets, rather than bring theology into it. But there are always exceptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. Their party supply catalog always con…