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Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

By Aliyya Swaby

…Panama City, where the Muslim community is starkly divided along race and class lines. Lebanese Muslims work predominately as businesspeople in the lucrative Free Trade Zone, one of the largest free trade ports in the world. In the city center, many residents are descendants of West Indian laborers on the Panama Canal throughout the twentieth century. The city has one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. Every year, a group of black Mu…

U.S. Bishops’ 15–year Battle For ‘Conscience’ and Against Contraception

By Patricia Miller

…or family planning clinics in low-income neighborhoods that served working-class Catholics, even as they knew that better-off women could access contraceptives through private physicians. But the approval of the Pill in 1960 and growing bipartisan support in Congress for a national, federally funded family planning program eventually swamped their opposition and they gave up the fight. I’ve been told by more than one source that by the mid-1970s,…

Pastor Implicated in Sex Abuse Scandal is Back

By Rob Shryock

…dividual plaintiffs [8 at this point], but also on behalf of a much larger class of people allegedly abused as minors in SGM, who do not wish to come forward with their stories. The suit alleges that the potential additional victims are too many to be included as individual plaintiffs in the suit because SGM’s leaders have cultivated an “environment conducive to and protective of physical and sexual abuse of children.” (Note: The lawsuit itself ca…

Baring Their Testimonies: Mormon Women Get Naked for the Camera

By Holly Welker

…Mormon friends from high school who went to state universities would go to class in pajamas. They would get dolled up to go out at night, but BYU doesn’t have that night culture. People don’t go clubbing; they don’t go to bars. Instead, people feel like they have to look good all day, all the time. Even for a 7 a.m. class? Yes. Walk around BYU campus and you’ll see a lot of very shiny, pretty, well-dressed, well put-together college students. It…

The Protestant Mainline Makes a (Literary) Comeback

By Gary Dorrien

…tual-but-not-religious sensibility that pervades the North American middle class, and they do so with a mostly appreciative attitude. From Shrinking Churches to ‘Cultural Victory’ Intellectual historian David Hollinger has spent the past decade writing about the overlooked social, cultural, and political achievements of liberal Protestantism, now collected in After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History. In Embatt…

Why I Fear The Post-Trayvon Martin Sermon

By Elizabeth Drescher

…hereafter kingdom where a lovely banquet free from racial, gender, ethnic, class, and other social biases will be offered to all… As far as I can tell from that, I’m meant to do something to contribute to the creation of the world envisioned as the Kingdom of God. It’s this last bit—the challenge to get up and act for justice—that I suspect will be missing from today’s lesson at my white, suburban church. Or, if there’s a hint of it, it won’t be f…

A Memoir of Jewish, Transgender Spirituality

By Joy Ladin

…tion of the transgender world, I am very much a product of a white, middle-class, mid-twentieth-century upbringing, I’m a religious (though not Orthodox) Jew, I’m an academic, and so on. But my hope was that by presenting my experience as specifically and intimately as possible, others would recognize aspects of that experience that relate to their own experience of struggling to become and be true to themselves. I also hope to broaden the perspe…

When Children’s Literature is Not Defined by “Innocence”

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…or twice. In a memoir you can’t do that. It’s also an amazing text in the classroom. I taught it in my “Women and Religion” course this spring and students reacted so viscerally and also so thoughtfully. So many Americans take religion as an “either/or” proposition. For my class, this book brought home the struggle at the heart of religious experiences. That’s an old thing, but it gets lost in our national conversations. It’s so hard to mention o…

The Religion of Self Improvement Grinds On Despite Hard Times for Grads

By Peter Laarman

…equired to hold a job, but it is not enough to deliver a reasonable middle-class income. In a recent Harper’s essay, Jeff Madrick accurately describes “get more education” as a cardinal tenet of mainstream economic orthodoxy, even as he pounds that tenet to smithereens: “Mainstream economists are disturbingly wedded to an ideology that fails to take into account the fact that labor markets can fail or that workers can be abused.” Madrick is especi…

Without Bev Shea, No Billy Graham

By Douglas Harrison

…me Brother Billy persona was of course one powerful alternative for middle-class evangelicals who wanted to look up and away from Sister Aimee’s down-market unseemliness. Shea’s success distinguished itself for being both more explicitly commercialized than Graham’s, while also retaining all the bourgeois respectability so often found missing in the tawdriness of the Elmer Gantrified competition—the faith healers and the New Thought movement and t…