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Science of Little Help with Personhood Issues

By Paul Wallace

…r public lingua franca. Science does, in fact, transcend local cultural vagaries of all kinds—religious, linguistic, ethnic—by referring to things that are demonstrably true about the single physical world we all inhabit. But science’s universality is expensive. Its price is all references to human meaning. Just last night after teaching a class on the big bang theory at my church, a gentleman asked me, “Do you think the expanding universe is a go…

The Bishops Did Send a Message with Their Vote on Biden and Communion; Are We Sure It Was The One They Intended?

By Daniel Schultz

…same page as they are on the sexual issues, and this presents them with a particular problem. It’s one thing to have someone like Obama to disagree with: he comes out of some crazy sect they’re not even sure is Christian. But Biden is a Catholic through and through. For many of the bishops, this is a real problem. Any pol who bucks their teachings is a problem, because it diminishes their authority. But a sitting president? That’s an embarrassment…

American Horror Story: Hotel and Monotheism’s Dirty Little Secrets

By W. Scott Poole

…Red Dragon of the Book of Revelation. Meanwhile, in South Asia, the naga—partially human, partially serpent—became bearers of good fortune. In Buddhism, a cobra-like naga named Mucalinda sheltered Gautama during his awakening under the bodhi tree. In China, dragons became, not beasts to be slain, but embodiments of Tian/T’ien, the very balance that brought cosmic harmony to the universe. Such concepts are mostly unknown to Western European and We…

Why I Miss Scalia: SCOTUS Punts on Religious Freedom

By Patricia Miller

…ly in the brief that it “expresses no view on the merits of the cases. In particular, the Court does not decide whether petitioners’ religious exercise has been substantially burdened.” Nothing to rule on here, certainly not the biggest constitutional question of our time: what exactly constitutes religious liberty and violations to it? As Garrett Epps notes in The Atlantic: The dispute is an important one, not only for the thousands of employees…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…basis. As pregnancy progresses, if these physical manifestations of her fear are inaccurately diagnosed and allowed to remain untreated, they may be intensified by the added strain of childbirth. Nausea and backaches! In pregnancy! Can you even imagine? So strange, these modern civilized women! So unlike skunks and turtles! How did we get from Dick-Read’s “It’s all in your head, little lady! [pat, pat]” to a more legitimately feminist call to und…

Staged Pussy Riot Trial Interrupted by Russian Authorities

By Chrissy Stroop

…y from March 1-3. The first two parts, “Caution, religion!” and “Forbidden Art” apparently went off without a hitch, while the final installment, “Pussy Riot,” has been interrupted indefinitely. Ekaterina Samutsevich, who took part in the “punk prayer” in Moscow’s symbolically significant Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and who was freed on appeal in October, was among the performers. Marking the one-year anniversary of the performance that got he…

Pussy Prophets & Nuns on Buses: Will Feminist Politics Get More Holy & Foolish?

By Beatrice Marovich

…ghtly more utopian dimension of hope: the spiritual as “a space for ‘imaginary yearning.’” Read this way, the “holy foolishness” of Pussy Riot’s punk prayer starts to look a lot more spiritual. And there is something spiritual—a real, but imaginative, yearning—that starts to emerge in their performance, and the legacies that break out in its wake. It’s not a spirituality that abandons politics (especially not feminist politics), but one that inser…

Jesus Loses His Freak: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 4

By Mark Dery

…ening Pharaoh’s heart so that he could justify punishing him for having a hard heart, which is what attorneys like to call a nice point of law. Yaweh seemed about as judicious and coolly rational as Idi Amin Dada, yet like every totalitarian Dear Leader he insisted his fear-sickened people love him…or else, booming, “I, the LORD your God”—always with the screaming CapsLock, like some online whack job—“am a jealous God, punishing the children for t…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…mental human rights” and he “expressed alarm at reports of a wave of arbitrary arrests and detention of individuals perceived to be homosexual in the country.” Since the new law was approved, representatives of The Gambia’s National Intelligence Agency have been reportedly conducting door-to-door enquiries to identify, arrest and detain individuals believed to be homosexual, and some of those detained have allegedly also been subjected to violent…

As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

By Katherine Kelaidis

…but strangely predictable explanation for the expansion, RT chief editor Margarita Simonyan tweeted, “We have launched RT in the Balkans. Because Kosovo is Serbia.“ This opportunism can also be seen in a recent meme, largely in Russian, repurposing a nearly 40-year-old slogan, which declares in various ways “Everything is Russia, except Kosovo. Kosovo is Serbia.” It’s a not-so-subtle message to the Serbian people: “Russia gets it. And a world wit…