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LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…rmon belief and practice. Reaction to the Romney campaign among Christian evangelicals has revealed the extent of the evangelical view that Mormons are not Christians. On Sunday morning, Elder M. Russell Ballard emphasized the place of the name “Jesus Christ” in the name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and reasserted that other branches of the Mormon movement—including fundamentalist Mormons who practice polygamy—should not be c…

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

By Paul Wallace

…. 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 scientists as priests that caught my attention. It’s an image that has a lot going for it. Before I say what exactly it has going for it, howev…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…y pit where you suffer endlessly forever and ever, amen—can be a great motivator for the true believer. It can motivate people to stop smoking, drinking, swearing, wearing their hair long, or cheating on their spouse or income taxes. I get emails from gay and lesbian Christians on almost a daily basis who are deeply worried that living into their natural, God-given sexuality will earn them a one way ticket to Satanland. That fear is real, that fea…

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

By Ed Simon

…teach us. Caitlin Corning explains in The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church that, even though at one point historians may have had a romantic attachment to the idea, more recently “scholars have abandoned the term Celtic Church believing it to be too closely associated with inaccurate ideas.” However, as her study makes clear, the general public is in no way allergic to this constructed history given…

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

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ein women’s reproductive organs exist for a clearly-discernible purpose, reflecting a sacred and beneficent design. Starting Over So, anyway, that’s where we are. The notion that pregnancy is not an illness draws, I daresay uneasily, from a number of sources. There’s the classical notion that a thing’s nature is derived from its purpose, and the purpose of female bodies is to bear children. There’s the persistent early modern fear that women, espe…

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

By Jeremy Biles

…beasts such as the sphinx. Argentine painter Leonor Fini created numerous variations on the Greek sphinx, while Salvador Dalí concocted a veritable menagerie of Egyptian and Greek sphinxes, including one scarlet-furred feline creature bearing the face of Shirley Temple and surrounded by the well-cleaned bones of her victims. Whether in religious myth or art, and whether apotropaic or menacing, the sphinx is a sacred monster—“something extraordina…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…ationships with men that were close and deep while reflective of the conservative values he holds. While not a choice I would quickly endorse, it was evident to me the helpful space the ex-gay world can give people like Leonard to grapple with the contradictions between sexuality and religion. Which is to say I can understand NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos’ effort, in defense of Morning Edition’s recent story on “conversion therapy,” to ack…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…rmon faith (Spiegel and Schumacher-Matos incorrectly identifies Wyler as “evangelical Christian”). However, the “identity therapy” (more completely sexual identity therapy) does not promote change of orientation and is largely consistent with the APA and other professional groups on the matter of the durability of sexual orientation. For the most part, this is a religious debate. Some religious people think that the only way to fit in to a non-aff…

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

By Daniel Schultz

…less pro-social, let us say. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, a Tampa Bay televangelist, equated changing habits in an effort to “flatten the course” with weakness, declaring that his congregation wouldn’t adjust their behavior in worship because they weren’t “pansies.” https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1239267305730736130 Others are willing to go some lengths to show they just don’t believe in this whole coronavirus thing: In Arkansas, the R…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…s surrounding clerical sexual abuse, from Wisconsin to Munich, has put the Vatican in a defensive posture against the media, circling the flaming wagons around its impervious leader. Making matters worse, the Pope tried to deflect from the mounting worldwide criticism with a stab at his detractors during his Palm Sunday homily, stating “Jesus leads us toward the courage not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion…