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

By Jason Wilson

…nvironment.” Northern Idaho fits the bill on both counts. Apart from the modest amount of provincial sprawl around Coeur d’Alene, what isn’t given over to public land is all farmland and acreage. It is one of the least populated parts of a state that has the seventh lowest population density in the country. Coeur d’Alene is a seven-hour drive from the Cathedral in Boise. Geographical isolation from church authority may be a factor in allowing cult…

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

By Elizabeth Drescher

…nist service members, it means that their existential disposition and associated practices 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 it…

What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…icant burden on a religious organization to require it, on pain of substantial liability, to predict which of its activities a secular court will consider religious. The line is hardly a bright one.” Thus, the Amos Court declined to adopt a constitutional bright line between religious and secular activities in order to grant religious organizations advantageous exemptions. However in Trinity Lutheran, it relies on precisely such a distinction in o…

Is Abortion No Longer Significant for Evangelicals — or Has it Just Become Like Water?

By Bradley Onishi

…now running free on its own. Abortion, in conclusion, remains significant to white evangelicals, period. Since the late 1970s it has been an expedient way for them to gain the moral high ground. After all, what’s worse than someone who wants to hurt children? But racism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism are now re-mainstreamed in conservative politics in ways they haven’t been since the 1970s. Where reproductive rights discourse once functioned as…

Boo! Trump’s Lead With Religious Voters Not As Bigly As You Might Think

By Daniel Schultz

…which often closely tracks the final total of overall voters. It’s also a number that varies quite a bit by the racial breakdown. While Trump wins white Catholics 48-41, he gets absolutely crushed among Hispanics, 84-12. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations put us firmly in “Holy shit” territory. Even assuming a generous 50-50 split of black, Asian, and other Catholics, Clinton comes out ahead something like 56-36. It’s highly unlikely the rac…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…s on Cornelius Vanderbilt and George Armstrong Custer, James Bradley on racialized imperialism, and (most creditably) Douglas A. Blackmon on the significance of black convict labor. The issues that Lehmann takes on here could not be more urgent for people constructed like me who fume and fuss over the near-total absence of a powerful religious critique of the sorry state of our affairs: today’s degraded and degrading “on demand” labor market, the…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ion. There were criminal craniums; that was the main idea. Naturally, the Nazi pseudo-science of racializing the human head and face dealt a deserved death-blow to such nonsense. But in studies like this one, Phrenology’s back again in a new form, implying this time that the size of the brain is any indicator of human intelligence. We’ve all been told countless times that the human brain is a highly redundant organ, and that each of us uses only a…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…to explain certain “universals” of religion (e.g. supernatural agents, burial practices) by describing brain features that all humans share. These two approaches represent different responses to a recent explosion of information that we have about the brain. Generally speaking, stack one is a place to go if you are interested in finding the neurological basis for an authentic religious experience; stack two is for those seeking to demystify relig…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…esses in the Charter have become painfully clear. In February, a Philadelphia grand jury found “substantial evidence” of abuse committed by thirty-seven priests in active ministry. Cardinal Justin Rigali, after initially claiming that there were no “admitted” or “confirmed” abusers in ministry, subsequently suspended twenty-seven clerics. And in May, the chair of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia review board revealed that the archdiocese had been k…

There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

By Haroon Moghul

…s of Palestinians—Muslim (Friday) and Christian (Sunday). Why would Christian Palestinians want to “lynch” Jesus? Or perhaps the embassy’s unknown provocateur meant to suggest the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, who are Muslims, would “lynch” Jesus Christ. This, too, is an astonishing assertion. There is no school of Islam that does not honor and revere Jesus Christ as a Prophet, as the Word and Spirit of God; moreover, Muslims revere Jesu…