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

By Ed Simon

…king Nial, who was responsible for Patrick’s kidnapping, the event which began the saint’s ministry in Ireland. Now, both Patrick and Columba are among the dozen canonized Disciples of Ireland, though beyond even that honorific, both are remembered as exemplars of “Celtic Christianity,” a version of the faith drawn towards the natural, the mystical, the eternal. Meditating to the lapping of the frigid Irish sea against the black rocks of Iona, Col…

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

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…en 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 they had to leave up to doctors’ judgment. It was this lack of knowledge that inspired the Boston Women’s Health Collective…

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

By Jeremy Biles

…tive interpretation. Multiply ambiguous, it is a strange concoction of any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply what the Chicag…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…he recognized that he was making a deliberate sacrifice, and criticized ex-gay organizations that insisted on full-scale orientation change as the arbiter of success. What I initially wanted to say in response to this story is what I learned from Leonard, and what the NPR ombudsman’s response aims toward but ultimately fails at: that gay people should be secure enough in the social and political gains made in recent decades to not be threatened by…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…Matos read an article by Mimi Swartz and published in the New York Times Magazine about same-sex attracted religious people who accept being same-sex attracted but do not identify as gay. I was quoted extensively in that piece and one of my former clients was interviewed for it. Here is what Schumacher-Matos surmises: In 2009, a task force of the American Psychological Association came out clearly against trying to convert someone’s sexuality beca…

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

By Daniel Schultz

…ciety, among the most physically intimate, and likely include the greatest number of vulnerable people. Even single members of large congregations can have a dramatic effect on how coronavirus spreads or doesn’t, as South Korea found out the hard way. While many aren’t meeting at all or are streaming services, some churches that do meet feel like they need to support those who need it, in worship or otherwise. My mother’s congregation in Madison,…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…things happen at the Vatican, since 2001 there have been 3000 cases investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), with 300 being incidences of pedophilia, and 600 priests defrocked in a ten-year period. These cases, according to Monsignor Charles J. Scicluna, represented sexual abuse cases that had occurred over the last fifty years. Unfortunately, this is a very small percentage of the cases worldwide, in part because Scic…

Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

By Brock Bahler

…vage acts upon them. The founding myths of America regularly draw from a legacy of settlers who utilized religious language to portray Christian colonialism as a civilizing process in order to justify violence against the indigenous inhabitants. Citing Columbus, in 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera (known as the Doctrine of Discovery), one of the most influential legal texts in history. The document stated that the Pope could “give, gran…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…experience of the Holy Spirit. But there were still many obstacles to navigate regarding the metaphysical claims of vampires. Of particular controversy was the existence of subtle energy or “psi,” which many vampires claim to feed on. Some of the vampires were quick to point out that I could not really understand their life-world if I dismissed the existence of subtle energy. By contrast, fellow scholars expressed concerns that I might lose my ob…

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…u stay faithful you will get x: to live among the stars like angels, pearl gates and crystal streets, a verdant garden with constantly running water. This is why visions of heaven remain so powerful to fundamentalists. They imagine themselves rightly or wrongly to be an oppressed minority in possession of a True view of things, given to them by God. When moderates and progressives fail to articulate a coherent or appealing view of heaven for thems…