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Why Pope Francis Makes Me Miss Jerry Falwell

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…. It also depends, quite assuredly, on getting those young people to fully buy in to the doctrine, dogmas and traditions that are held by each. Which is why we are hearing a lot of pretty progressive talk about acceptance and loving of neighbors, and absolutely no actual movement toward reforming, revising or jettisoning the very exclusive and mean-spirited doctrines and dogmas that young people rejected in the first place. Which leads me to agree…

Churches Don’t Feed People, People Feed People

By Brie Loskota

…o understand what kinds of people make up these congregations, and in what numbers. White middle class congregations with sprawling campuses and professional ministerial, administrative, and social programs staff are not the norm. In many urban neighborhoods or among immigrant religious groups, the landscape looks quite different—in fact, the average congregation in the U.S. is about 100 members. USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture develo…

Has This Anti-Muslim Extremist Reformed… Or Just Gotten Less Extreme?

By Nathan Lean

…s no longer with the group, people will listen to him. Heck, they may even buy his “I was once an anti-Muslim extremist” book (which happens to fit well into the growing niche of the “I was once a Muslim extremist” category). Two serious questions remain for Robinson and for Quilliam, which facilitated his departure. First, will Robinson’s message really change? Just because he’s no longer with the EDL and claims to reject the increasingly violent…

Lindsey Graham and Al Qaeda Share the Same “Allahu Akbar”

By Nathan Lean

…tors who misuse these terms have allies in people like Lindsey Graham, who buy into their twisted interpretations, turning one of the most fundamental phrases of the Islamic faith into a “war chant” simply because a few yahoos run around shouting it after some ghastly act. When the Westboro Baptist Church says “Thank God for 9/11” and “Praise the Lord for dead US soldiers” few would argue that “Thank God” or “Praise the Lord” are somehow inextrica…

Sam Harris and the New Islamophobes, Deconstructed

By Hamdan Azhar

…ic grounds of “self-quantification” and “Bayesian morality.” This is the proper contextual lens in which to read the enablers of neoconservatism and the apologists for new atheism. To buy the meme that the irrational fear of Islam represents a failing of Islam and Muslims is to end the possibility of constructive discourse….

Scope Bacon, Twttr Hoaxes & Joel Osteen’s Big Reveal

By Deborah Whitehead

…t it was launching a “two-tiered service” in which users would now have to buy their vowels. The “basic service,” Twttr, which includes only consonants, would usher in a “more efficient and ‘dense’ form of communication.” For $5 a month, users could purchase vowels too using the “premium” Twitter service (“y”s are free). “Hppy prl fl’s dy,” read the new Twttr mockup. YouTube announced that at midnight on March 31 it would shut down its site for th…

When Bad Weeks Happen to Good People

By Kate Blanchard

…he US Senate’s vote not to make it even a tiny bit harder for Americans to buy guns. So much high-profile violence in rapid succession prompted The Onion to cry, “Jesus, this week” (while Jezebel went even further). Such events bring to mind age-old questions of “theological anthropology,” which religions have sought to answer since time immemorial: Is there such a thing as universal human nature, and if so, is it ineluctably violent? Is all this…

Christians Should Give Up “Christianity”: An Interview with Peter Rollins

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…thing okay. Everywhere we turn, advertisements tell us “consume this,” or “buy this product,” or “look this way and you’ll be happy.” The world is like a huge vending machine and it’s filled with these idols. My argument is that when we reduce God to that object that will make us complete and whole and happy, we just put our own product in the vending machine. The church becomes the shop front, the clergy become the salespeople and the worship bec…

Rejecting the Stranger: Why Rod Dreher’s Vision of Communal Christian Life Is Not So Benedictine After All

By Kaya Oakes

…hat even if progressive Christian denominations were shrinking, increasing numbers of American Christians who no longer attend church would still move toward a more progressive theology, a more Gospel-based sense of welcoming the stranger, and vote accordingly. For the most part, they did not. Thus, as a prominent voice for conservative Christianity, Rod Dreher has every reason to be strutting his stuff. Conservative Christianity rode four horses…

A Test for Trump—And the Religious Right

By Sarah Posner

…best positioned candidate to handle immigration. That’s a pretty stunning number given Moore’s very public rejections of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, and is indicative of one kind of split among these voters. But voters who will self-identify as “born again” or “evangelical” to a pollster are not a monolith. As Warren Smith argues at WORLD magazine, “watching Joel Osteen on TV doesn’t make you an evangelical.” Smith calls the evangelical supp…