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Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…aid. Yes, but what we can do we must do, I told Casey, recalling the wise words a friend told me years ago, words that eventually changed transformed my own life and family. “Exactly,” she said, explaining how since that first trip in 2003 she spends five months a year in Nepal (the most allowed by her tourist visa) and the other seven months in California fundraising for Chhahari, the organization she founded that runs a home for about two dozen…

Religious Practices on Trial in Arizona: The Problem With “Experts”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…s. In following the Ray story over the past few months, I am amazed at the number of non-Indian sweat lodge experts the media has been able to locate. Few Indians if any have been interviewed; and even decidedly liberal MSNBC featured Court TV anchor Ashleigh Banfield as their expert on the sweat lodge. Banfield’s expertise, admitted on air, was one sweat experience with her stepbrother or brother-in-law (she wasn’t sure how he was related), “step…

Hobby Lobby: Key to a More Liberal and Less Religious America?

By Rebecca Sager

…te hearts and minds, and moving people out of the pews across America. The number of nones (people with no religious preference) is on the rise, with over 20% of all Americans claiming this status, and many point to the increased politicization of religion as the cause. This trend of legal victories will, in the long run, very likely create a more secular America. Recent data indicate that this process is already clearly under way. A poll just rel…

Hold Your Applause: Potential Changes to Roles of Catholic Women and LGBTQ+ People May Just Be Vatican Breadcrumbing

By Mary E. Hunt

…ons, but “the promotion of the baptismal dignity of women, the role of the ordained Ministry and in particular the ministry of the Bishop within the missionary synodal Church” (par. 55). A simple gender analysis would quickly reveal that women are consigned to the service sector (by baptism), not the sacramental or decision-making ranks that are for men only. In other words, women can serve but men preside, decide, and proscribe. Or, try this fals…

New Poll: Evangelicals Backing Trump

By Daniel Schultz

…cals have made up around one-quarter of the electorate ever since 2000. According to Pew, that number will be a bit lower this time around: about 20%, by their estimate. White evangelicals are losing ground to non-white voters just like all whites, and to the religiously unaffiliated, just like all Christians. Those unaffiliated voters—the “Nones”—now rival white evangelicals in size. About two-thirds of them support Hillary Clinton, making them a…

Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

By Bill Berkowitz

…ity. Many of the organizations and leaders look back to the Constitutional order prior to the Civil War, when the national-state was a Whites-only republic. Others look forward to the creation of a new White nation-state carved out of the lands of North America. While these ideas were present in the movement from its re-inception in the mid-1970s, they only became dominant in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War ushered in a new era. Across th…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…mblazoned in our cultural consciousness. On November 18, 1978, the largest number of American civilian lives was lost due to a single non-natural disaster—a sad distinction Jonestown would hold until September 11, 2001. In Stories from Jonestown, the most recent addition to the Jonestown library, Leigh Fondakowski has compiled the numerous interviews that she conducted in order to write her play, The People’s Temple, which ran at the Berkeley Rep…

Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

By Brittany Shoot

…xperiments), she began to question the idea of devotion to a guru. After a number of attempts to leave, she broke free of the group at age twenty-five. I recently caught up with Tamm to talk about Sri Chinmoy’s death, her use of the word “cult,” and what her spiritual life looks like today. ** Did it make a difference to his followers that Sri Chinmoy was from India? Did it give him extra authority? In the late 1960s, there was a trend to look to…

Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies

By Todd LeVasseur

…be of worth to societies grappling with averting collapse and, at least according to the data points above, adapting to what appears to be the very real possibility of runaway climate change. This means centering across our discipline and in our departments the natural world. And we must do so in a way that emphasizes justice, racial and otherwise. There are movements within religious studies that point towards helping with such a reorganization….

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ers who had allegedly been plotting a coup. He was released on Tuesday, according to the New York Times, hours before scheduled protests in London, Cairo and elsewhere. Mada Masr has published Bahgat’s account of his ordeal, which concludes defiantly: I wish for freedom for the thousands of people unfairly detained in Egyptian prisons. I reassert my rejection of the criminalization of journalistic work, the use of the Penal Code to imprison journa…