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Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…of women. Ruttenberg followed up Yentl’s Revenge last year by releasing a spiritual memoir about her own coming of age journey: Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion. From the decision to be an atheist when she was 13 years old to her ultimate, though somewhat reluctant, choice to become a rabbi, Ruttenberg’s story shows the ways religious practice is complicated yet valuable for its complexity. This month she will re…

Niebuhrian Humility and DC Punditry

By Daniel Schultz

…emselves up as dispassionate umpires rising above the partisan fray in the spirit of Niebuhrian humility, when Niebuhr himself would tell them that they were just as prone to error as anyone else. Again, I’ll leave it up to my readers to decide if this is fair to the Villagers or not. I will say that after eight years of George W. Bush’s reign of error, calls for a more technocratic form of government sound welcome. I will also say this much. Rose…

High Schooler says Barbara Ehrenreich’s Book Violates his Civil Rights

By Sarah Posner

…roup in recognition of books “which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” In the section at issue, I observed that the social teachings of Jesus went utterly unmentioned at the tent revival I attended. The revival preachers clearly preferred the dead and risen Christ to the living Jesus — who did indeed drink wine and could even make it out of water. As for the vagrancy charge: that’s what he was, a homeless, itinerant preacher. Ehrenrei…

Spiritual (And Jewish), But Not Religious

By Martin Kavka

…ews who do not identify as religious claim to “believe in God or universal spirit” with absolute certainty, and when one adds in the proportion of interviewees who believe with less certainty, we have the fascinating statistic that almost half of “Jews of no religion” are nonetheless believers. On the other side of the coin, 20% of Reform Jews do not believe in God. What this suggests is that there is a disconnect between the way many Jews underst…

No Zombies Here, Just a Bunch of Women Talking to the Dead

By LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

…etical to or in conflict with traditional Protestant Christianity, it is a spiritual practice that is seamlessly integrated into the lives of the seven women in the study. Is there anything you had to leave out? A little bit of text and a lot of music! In terms of the written materials, there is this really rich historical material surrounding Mason Crum, a former Duke University professor and South Carolina native who was heavily influenced by th…

Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness

By Beatrice Marovich

…interest in transdisciplinary conversations. Perhaps theologians, pastors, spiritual leaders, people who are spiritually attuned to irreligious forms of creativity, will find some new ways to communicate about these things. But if science is left out of the mix, we will always be off in lala land. We need the incarnational practice of taking into account the most precise knowledge we can find, in the face of the mystery of our embodied existence….

No God but Country: The Religion of John McCain Has Something Important to Tell Us

By Kathryn Lofton

…or a Suburban. Yet McCain supplies no wake-up call, no re-awakening of his spirit to explicate his substitution of Sunday affections. He offers no specifications of the kind of Christ that pressed him from a the Book of Common Prayer to the Baptist Faith and Message. Nor, as mentioned above, has he shown the increased piety of the convert. When asked how often he attends church McCain says, “not as often as I should.” When asked whether he has par…

Will Women Priests Change the Church?

By Mary E. Hunt

…ook place in Detroit, Michigan; the eponymous organization arose from that spirited event. WOC sponsored another meeting in 1978 in Baltimore where women were very specific about the kind of renewed priestly ministry they would accept: one without clericalism, without mandatory celibacy, without hierarchy, but with the inclusion of all and a focus on social justice. WOC became the go-to organization on these matters, holding subsequent meetings an…

R.I.P. Pope John Paul’s “Contraceptive Mentality”: 1979–2014

By Patricia Miller

…storal cart leading the doctrinal horse, as Thomas Reese notes: [T]he only way the synod is going to change anything is for the bishops to first convince themselves that they are not changing doctrine, only the way they are expressing it. … Perhaps bishops, guided by the Spirit, should just discern better pastoral practices and then leave it to the theologians to explain why they are OK. If this is the case, then the Francis revolution will be les…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Jihadis?

By Haroon Moghul

…le to grow up as part of one.) The façade was dusky peach, and trapped the spirit of sundown. On each side were two great gazebos, where folks ate and talked late into the pleasant night; there was a beach volleyball pit and a full basketball court. The occasion was more stressful: an Open House, an invitation to explain Islam in America to a general audience of San Antonians. Afterwards, a garrulous visitor asked me how I reconciled Muhammad’s te…