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Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…

Why I Give Zero F*cks What Anti-Gay Christians Think

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…hey say? Who gives a fuck what they believe?” Now, with the release of the Nashville Statement, a 14-point manifesto on human sexuality endorsed by a group of evangelical leaders this past week shows why every person of good will should give zero fucks about their ill-founded and hateful opinions about LGBT people. Yes, I know. What they say and what they believe has been the source of suffering for many LGBT people who have prostrated themselves…

Sacred Real Estate: What Makes Washington’s WWII Memorial So Dreadful?

By Michael A. Elliott

…the first time, through the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington. Dedicated in 2004, the Memorial is a broad plaza of fountains, pillars, and sculpted wreaths. It also sits in the shadow of the Washington Monument, in a direct axis with the Lincoln Memorial. It’s hard to imagine more symbolic real estate. How this monumental configuration came to be is the subject of Kirk Savage’s brilliant new book, Monument Wars. Equal parts…

RD News Round-Up—Nov. 4, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…tive Council for National Policy is currently headed by Steve Baldwin. The Washington, D.C.-based operation had $1,690,914 in revenue in 2007. Americans United points out on its website that there are a number of other important religious right organizations to be aware of, including Gary Bauer’s American Values, Rick Scarborough’s Vision America, and Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition. An expanded version of the Church & State story is av…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

By Susan Henking

…in overt ways. Cohocton is a small town, with a population in 2009 of about 800 people. It is in upstate New York. It is not my small town, nor is it likely yours; and yet each of these places is someone’s neighborhood. This time, it is only an hour away for me. Picketing as “The Workingman’s Means of Communication” On March 2, 2011, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in response to a series of prior decisions around Westboro Baptist Church’s pi…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…ed on by three nuns who live in a nearby coach house—very Downton Abbey. • Seattle Archbishop James Sartain, who is currently in charge of making sure that the naughty nuns of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious don’t spend too much time worrying about social justice issues, lives alone in a charming three-story brick Victorian home valued at $3.84 million. • Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, head of the bishop’s Committee on Religious L…

US Archbishop and Vatican-Appointed “Overseer” Attends Annual Meeting of Women Religious

By Emily Baxter

…, Florida, was made up of 825 nuns and only three priests, one of whom was Seattle’s Archbishop J. Peter Sartain—the official charged by the Vatican with overseeing the LCWR following last year’s harsh assessment of American nuns. The Vatican came down hard on American sisters last year, admonishing them for doing too much “social justice” work, disagreeing with Church teaching on gay people, and propagating “radical feminist themes.” Not surpris…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…sle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol,…