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Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…hild, and his wife, Rheka, who have adopted or otherwise given a home to a number of girls and young women who have survived sometimes horrific abuse and neglect. “I’m just here to be here,” Heuertz would say apologetically from time to time during our visits in and around Kathmandu, as if showing up and being fully, lovingly present weren’t a robust enough mission. “I just wanted to come and support my friends, to show them I love them, and be he…

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…so I discovered that the sociological data suggested that the majority of Americans believe in ghosts or demons. Indeed, a surprising 73% of Americans have at least one paranormal belief, and while the data is less robust it looks like there are similar belief patterns in Western Europe. At the very least, it seems hard to argue that the “modern West” is straightforwardly disenchanted. So I asked myself how did we get the notion that “modernity”…

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…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…to date was HPA for the Win in June 2010, during which HPA mobilized huge numbers of online voters from across fandoms and online communities to win a $250,000 grant from the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Then there’s the current “Deathly Hallows” campaign, which centers on the release date of a Harry Potter movie—in this case, The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on Nov. 19. The Deathly Hallows campaign will run for nine months—the time bet…

“Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?”: Rock and Religion, Irish-Style

By Lisa Bitel

…boys. In all, the Saw Doctors have produced seven studio albums and thirty number one singles. Music critics have compared the band’s effect to that of the Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen because of their ability to make the small negotiations and crises of everyday life seem so politically urgent, and to do so in catchy melodies and upbeat rhythms. But the real secret to Docs’ success lies in their devoted cult following among Irish, British,…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…is no more than a platitude. Pick your apocalypse: zombie apocalypse, any number of post-apocalyptic worlds that crowd our television screens, movie theaters, and book stores, or, perhaps more traditionally, the apocalypse associated with the Second Coming. Think of the 2011 Family Radio Billboards: “He is Coming Again! May 21, 2011.” Or the tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker: Jesus is Coming, Look Busy. During the last week of January 2015, police i…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…s copies of the book have sold for the past half century and it was ranked number 9 in the “Top 50 Books the Have Shaped Evangelicals” by Christianity Today, alongside works by C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Francis Schaffer, and Rick Warren. Her influence is well noted in her obituary by Kate Shellnutt at Christianity Today. Through Elliot’s book, evangelicals latched on to the deaths of these five young men, and their story became a galvanizin…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…ole.” A 2009 Gallup Poll found “almost no difference between rank-and-file American Catholics and American non-Catholics” in terms of the moral acceptability of abortion, with 40% of Catholics saying it was morally acceptable versus 41% of all Americans.” A 2013 Pew Poll found that just over half (53%) of white Catholics said that having an abortion was morally wrong, which was slightly higher than general opinion (49%), while three-quarters of wh…

Prosperity Gospel and Foreclosure

By Sarah Posner

…ation but to make a “Passover offering.” Seven is a biblically significant number, the number of completion and perfection, and in this spring of 2007 the Praise-a-thon began on Easter Sunday, the seventh day of Passover. If you make the Passover offering, Munsey claims, God will give you seven blessings: God will dispatch an angel to lead miracles; rid you of your enemies; bless you with prosperity; heal you; give you longevity; give you an inher…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…