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LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…of Christ. Baptism by immersion in the name of Jesus Christ is the gateway ordinance for membership in the Church. Yet when I have asserted the Christianity of Mormon belief for national audiences, the number one reaction has come from Christians who seek to correct my understanding of my faith and remind me that Mormons are not, in their eyes, Christians. Some assert that they’ll be praying for my mistaken soul (and the soul of my Jewish husband…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…ion or function of the brain, it must not be real. The article points to a number of ways neuropsychology has been overinterpreted and oversold. Rosenbaum addresses the fetishizing of fMRI images, the ideology that conflates causation and correlation, and the shifting semantics — evil recast as “non-empathy” by one esteemed psychologist (echoing, interestingly, the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation). But it’s the image of…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexual feelings or become a bit more bi. And possibly none who turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do not prove that categorical change in sexual orientation is possible for everyone or anyone, but rather that meaningful shifts along a continuum that constit…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…and in Washington DC the Taoiseach will present the president with a Waterford Crystal filled with shamrocks. We’ll see kitschier associations as well, from “Kiss Me I’m Irish” t-shirts to full-grown adults cosplaying as leprechauns. Clergy have expressed concern about secular revelry obscuring the religious significance of what, after all, is a saint’s day. Fr. Ryan Jones, an Episcopal priest at the Eucharist Church in San Francisco, wrote last y…

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

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ble to say “breast cancer,” simply because it was indelicate to utter the word “breast.” Obituaries primly referred to women dying “after a long illness.” Likewise, for those of us who remember Margaret’s secret club nickname in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, or whose college orientations included a condom demonstration session, it’s difficult to fully grasp how little most women once knew about their own reproductive health, or how much th…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…her apotropaic or menacing, the sphinx is a sacred monster—“something extraordinary that disrupts the natural order of things,” as historian of surrealism Celia Rabinovitch has put it. Further emphasizing the sacred status of the beast, Rabinovitch notes that the “union of the [human] and the animal” in the sphinx “provokes a sense of the irrational and the holy.” The Chicago Picasso certainly disrupts the architectural order of its surrounds, and…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…ving those relationships may be a good and worthy goal, and I spoke with a number of ex-gay men who spoke of the gifts that pursuing their heterosexual marital relationships gave. But this is not a change in sexual orientation; it is making one particular heterosexual relationship work. Homo-Intimacy The other element in Wyler’s story, one that is common in many ex-gay change narratives, is the centrality of male intimacy in the process of orienta…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…chniques (beating pillows to vicariously release aggression on parents) in order to change orientation. This is not what the New York Times article was about. In contrast to this report, the New York Times article generated no controversy or outrage. If Spiegel wanted to report on people who accept their sexuality but live in such a way to honor their religious commitments then why interview a guy who promises that gays can change? This is complic…

From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

By Daniel Schultz

…re’s a sense that it’s more important to preach a message of comfort or a word of judgment against the White House. On the other hand, there’s a denial of the reality, and a desire to demonstrate a counter-power in butch demonstrations of faith in God, or the inscrutable gnosticism of believing it to be nothing more than a liberal plot against God and country—and God and country’s designated representative, Donald Trump. Religious types aren’t the…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…s”) is the language of a dying institution. These are people who trade in words, who argue incessantly in ecumenical dialogues about a word’s meaning. The problem is, the Vatican and its minions haven’t figured out that we are past the days of the monastic scribe, slowly chiseling out each word. The internet age has assured that their choice, ill-crafted words can be made available to everyone (assuming the church hasn’t shredded or put them under…