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Mitt Romney’s Best-Known Mormon Critic Tells it All. One Last Time.

By Joanna Brooks

…out how the press found you. Judy Dushku: I’ve had calls from all over the world—newspaper outlets, public television, NPR, panels, morning talk shows. People want me to talk about how I knew Mitt when he was the leader of my congregation. And he was. My bishop and stake president. Because he held those roles, it meant that I should be respectful and welcome him when he came to my home and that I should accept callings (church service assignments)…

A Time to Break Down, and A Time to Build Up: Reinventing Ministry in Post-Katrina New Orleans

By Ellen Blue

…curred. Is there anything you had to leave out? Oh, yes, there are so many stories that are missing. Early on in the book, I explain the process by which I decided that I would have to limit the project geographically to the city of New Orleans. And even within the city, some congregations are barely mentioned, and some deeply involved pastors are absent from the narrative. That doesn’t mean their stories aren’t important. But I have an office ful…

October “Baby” is a Grown Woman

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ion would be like if women were all beautiful, tragic figures, living in a world run by men who treated them with, not respect, but a kind of indulgent kindness. Well, okay. In the real world of policy, poverty, pregnancy complications, and domestic violence are often important factors too. But never mind that. Just look at the sad, beautiful, fragile women in need of forgiveness. October Baby’s usefulness for understanding reproductive health pol…

Fact Check: Is the Evangelical Youth-Inspired Great ‘Awokening’ Just Around the Corner?

By Chrissy Stroop

…nd in the way of wishful thinking. And that’s why, year after year, we get stories like this: Hip New Churches Sway to a Different Drummer (2004) Evangelicals Open Debate on Widening Policy Questions (2005) Are Young Evangelicals Skewing More Liberal? (2008) It’s Not Your Father’s Christian Right (2008) Young Evangelicals Seek Broader Political Agenda (2008) The Evangelical Divide (2017) ‘God is Going to Have to Forgive Me’: Young Evangelicals Spe…

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

By Scott Blaine Swenson

…s of his father, “it’s always about him and his personal life. We were instruments to be used. Any concern for our individuality was absent.” Nate explains that the Phelps children (and now grandchildren) were brought up believing the world was evil, everyone and everything outside their family compound was sinful, self-motivated. The children were routinely humiliated by their father, sent to school with shaved heads for not selling enough candy…

Unmasking the “Veiled Prophet” Behind a 135-Year-Old St. Louis Tradition

By Spencer Dew

…tion of a movie poking fun at conspiracy theories regarding government coverups of alien contact, this month’s parade featured: A blow-up Uncle Sam, six stories high… followed after a while by a four-story American eagle, and a six-story firefighter. A real bald eagle rode a keeper’s arm on the World Bird Sanctuary’s float, along with an owl and a big green snake. Mythic narratives and cultural heroes mixed with symbols of identity and values, all…

Social Cost of Christianity?

By Lauri Lebo

…ot sure how they’ll be received. I pointed out to her that she’s confusing rude behavior with stigma. Nonetheless, my relative insisted this is persecution and she envisions a day when she goes to church and the government will have locked all the doors. Not too long ago, two Jehovah Witnesses knocked on my door and told me that End Times are coming and they sincerely wanted to know what I believe. I said I couldn’t believe any God worth worshipin…

Toni Morrison, Prophet of America’s Demons (1931-2019)

By Ed Simon

…is language, that she always defers to its ability to construct and create worlds. It’s true that those discourses of race have been mediated through language and literature; but it’s also true that it’s a civic duty to question and deconstruct those traditions. But as Morrison reminds us in Playing in the Dark, it’s also language’s ability to construct new and better, fairer, and more beautiful worlds, so that the “ability of writers to imagine w…

Way Beyond Atheism: God Does Not (Not) Exist

By Paul Wallace

…never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth. Perhaps he thinks the success of science makes it a self-evident choice when it comes to grounding his worldview; what he does not and will not consider is the very real possibility that science is so successful precisely because it is so limited. To reject this possibility out-of-hand is nothing but intellectual laziness. Dawkins is dogmatically rigid and fixed in pl…

Was George W. Bush the Last Hippie?

By David R. Williams

…ost-modernism’s solipsism. Paglia was right: romantic rebellions against structure lead to decadence which ends up forcing a return to structure until the cycle begins again. Dualism is, rightly understood, more liberating than any monism. Theological Discourse needs to be rescued from the fundamentalists and the secularists. Theory is what theology was. Anything you had to leave out? Probably not, but everyone I know asks what about this book? Th…