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After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…n culture is “exceptional”—exceptional in its toxicity, that is. A growing number of truth telling historians are eager to help us discover these deeper roots if we are willing to listen. Here I’m thinking mainly of scholars like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Gerald Horne who focus on the connections between settler colonialism, white supremacy, and an unparalleled level of gun violence. To me the question that grows more acute daily is how to amplify…

Religious Opposition To LGBT Equality Softening

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…rea of life from housing, to employment, to service in the military, to marriage rights, has come from religious quarters. Recent trends, however, show even religious opposition is softening. The UK-based religious think-tank Ekklesia is claiming that a growing number of Christian groups are now identifying as supporting gays and lesbians than in previous years. In a press release, Symon Hill, associate director of Ekklesia, noted that a welcoming…

Updated: G-O-D Plays a Bit Part in First GOP Debate

By Daniel Schultz

…clumsily in another. The effect was to make the debate seem truly like a prize fight; less the exciting clobbering-time part than the opening rounds where the boxers jab tentatively at one another trying to figure out where their opponent will hit. Except of course Trump, who went after everybody with a two-by-four. Even the god talk—normally red meat for the Republican base—was strangely attenuated. Walker, as is his wont, dodged Kelly’s questio…

Harry Reid vs. Islamic Cultural Center

By Joanna Brooks

…t’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Philadelphia after Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter tried to extract a six-figure sum from the Churc…

Religious Kids Are More Selfish: The Stickers Don’t Lie

By Michael Schulson

…rong—for all I know, all the world over, kids who engage more with certain ritual experiences are less kind to their peers. The problem is that, absent robust evidence for his generalizations about the Nature of all Christians and Muslims, it is difficult to tell where Decety’s grand claims emerge from actual evidence, and where they may owe a debt to politicized beliefs about how religion in general, or specific religious traditions (i.e. Islam),…

Mormon Leaders Slam ‘Counterfeit’ Gay Families; Vatican Resists Gay Ambassador; ISIS Executes Man for Homosexuality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…can do.” Obama made another reference to gay rights to the audience that primarily consisted of young people before introducing Jackson. “You’re more eager for progress that comes not by holding down any segment of society, but by holding up the rights of every human being, regardless of what we look like or how we pray or who we love,” he said. Obama’s comments come against the backdrop of rampant anti-LGBT discrimination and violence in country…

Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

By Danny Fisher

…as a blanket endorsement of military solutions: I think what has to take priority now, since the formation of the United Nations, are the conditions for just warfare that are laid down within their charter. One is that a nation is justified in going to war only if it attacked by another nation and it needs to take immediate defensive action to prevent the prospect of immediate violence and destruction before the U.N. can intervene. The other cond…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…vers into Dallas’s Cotton Bowl. (Attendance swelled to 250,000 on the day Kris Kristofferson performed.) The Jesus Freaks’ ad-hoc theology could be summed up in two words: solus Jesus (“Jesus alone”), a “radically Jesus-centric” Christianity (to borrow a phrase from the religious historian Stephen Prothero) that privileged a soul-joltingly emotional relationship with the Son of God. The Jesus movement took the tendency, in American Christianity, t…

“That Guy In Rome”: A Catholic Town in Idaho Where The Pope is a Heretic

By Jason Wilson

…s the Prior of the Post Falls community, and he stresses that the SSPX is primarily a priestly order, and the fathers are not specifically trained to be parish priests. Vassal is urbane, mid-40s and speaks with a heavy French accent. It took some doing to get him to sit down, and he admits that the order is media-shy due to a tendency on the part of reporters to “reduce matters of faith to sociology or politics.” He steers clear of culture war top…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…actices are designated in their military records with language not shaped primarily in opposition to traditional religious designations. “‘Atheist’ says only what I’m not,” Bradley explained. “‘Humanist is what I am. It is how I live my life. The principles of Humanism guide me through life’s challenges and provide me with a sense of purpose to experience life to its fullest. Atheism does neither.” Those who might think that Bradley’s insistence…