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Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

By Lynne Gerber

…r when I read Marie Griffith’s fantastic book Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. The book discusses many different moments in the vast and varied American religious practices around food, dieting, and the body, including contemporary evangelical weight loss programs. At the time I didn’t know such things existed. But reading the book made it clear that Christian weight loss was a great way to investigate the moral and re…

Love the Sinner? Then Support Their Rights

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…y anti-Christian, and can find no deep justification but in the ideas, the spirit and the faith of free religion.” Mr. Abbot seems, on the surface, to agree with the sentiments of Goeke. The church must stand firm in its “truth” and fight this evil. Yet, Mr. Abbot understood what Goeke doesn’t—the fight for suffrage for women was not a sinful behavior. Though he can find no justification for women’s rights in the Bible, he finds his conscience is…

DNC Platform, Thy Name is Esther

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…n, even though they take God’s name in vain a few times). Without ever mentioning God, the DNC platform, perhaps less poetically than the writer of Song of Songs, still captures the spirit perfectly: “Love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave… Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”…

The Search For Proofs For God’s Existence

By Gordon Haber

…n years coming to terms with the experience of converting to Catholicism at 18, and that process caused me to read a lot of dead writers. In the course of reading them through the lens of my own experience, it became clear that the ideas of these writers were products of experience—and anguish and struggle—as well as of abstract thought. Most histories of theistic proofs today, however, leave out the experience and focus only on the abstraction. I…

Why Are Muslims So Concerned with Muhammad?

By Haroon Moghul

…w is it that a $5 million budget can buy you so little? And, who produces a 14-minute trailer? That’s just offensive. In Islam, the Qur’an is the literal word of God, and Muhammad represents the embodiment of those words of God. If you want to know what Islam is in text, go to the Qur’an; if you want to know what Islam is in action, study Muhammad’s life. That’s what Muslims do. They study it, debate it, and investigate it obsessively. Muslims bel…

The Creepy Surveillance of Elf on a Shelf

By Kelly J. Baker

…agic plausible. Writing on Santa, Nathan Schneider argues that the holiday spirit is mostly based on the irrelevance of proof. Evidence does not matter because Santa. Adults all know that Santa does not exist, yet lying to children about him is cultural expectation. Try explaining to someone, anyone really, that you want to opt of St. Nick for your kids. To put it mildly, it does not go over well. (I might have been accused of child abuse.) There…

“Burka Avenger”: Pakistan’s Middle Class Gets a Feminist Cartoon

By M. Sophia Newman

…he identified burkas as “a tacit critique of the darker side of the modern spirit” and a way for Muslim women to maintain their identity while transitioning from rural traditions to industrialized urban living. “Burka Avenger,” in other words, may do more to encourage the large majority of Pakistanis already enjoying relatively strong education than to convince uneducated people of the value of schooling. Indeed, wealthier people may find it easie…

Material(ist) Girl: A Philosopher Argues Against the Soul

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…components, because it surely does. You practice yoga? For many that’s a spiritual or religious practice. What does it mean for you? I’m getting on in years and I thought I would really like to have a some more exercise and I didn’t like aerobics, so I went to a yoga class. It was very strenuous and very demanding and then we went into shavasana, the relaxation at the end, and I came out of that thinking, “Holy mackerel, I’m high!” It was just t…

Pope Francis Distances Himself Further from the Right in New Interview

By Peter Montgomery

…It is necessary to accompany them with mercy. When that happens, the Holy Spirit inspires the priest to say the right thing…. We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter,…

What The Church Needs More Than a ‘Good Pope’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ve Me Warm… The interview’s complexity arises from the overlay of Ignation spirituality that forms Francis’ spirit and psyche. It’s a language and symbol set all its own—heavy with “discernment” and reliant on prayer as a means of knowing. The interviewer tries to interpret it at times (who knew that Peter Faber [1506-46] was such an influential fellow?), but what stands out is how Francis is imbued with the customs and governance style of the Soc…