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“Tell Me What You Believe About Ferguson, and I’ll Tell You What You Believe About God”: A Missouri Pilgrimage

By Anita Little

…e the same epiphany he had. He eschews respectability politics in favor of direct protest, hoping to afflict the comfortable and rattle the complicit. He has also increasingly embraced social media as a tool for changing perspectives, using the #JusticeForJesus hashtag to tweet modern retellings of the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus through the lens of the Black Lives Matter movement. Rev. McBride, center Ferguson has taken a fraught place in the…

Rage Against the New Age Machine: Three Days at the Osho International Meditation Resort

By Diane Winston

…nstitutions and spiritual movements need money. I’ve paid for High Holiday tickets, passed the plate at church, and dropped bills into the basket at yoga class. But Osho’s opacity and its denial of the obvious (robes and shampoos, wine and brownies, books and videos were all moneymakers) bothered me. My fuming was worthless. Orientation still started 45 minutes late. My students and I, packed into a classroom with 20 other guests, were led through…

Our Lady of Good Hope and Excellent Behavior: Why this Apparition and Why Now?

By Lisa Bitel

…ion by joining other denominations or leaving Christianity altogether. The number of priests and nuns was at an all-time low even before the recent sexual scandals, and the number of self-identified Catholics world-wide keeps declining. Many of those who remain in the Church ignore standard doctrines and believe what they want. How many Catholics disobey Church rules? About as many as the angels dancing on a pinhead. Believers know that Jesus prom…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…ded social resource scarcity for those most in need. What this large-scale flight of social resources left in its wake was not an urban demographic characterized by upward mobility but by severe poverty and social isolation. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of persons living in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 40 percent or higher grew from 7.8 to 15.8 percent for blacks and from 7.0 to 9.5 percent for Hispanics, and by 2010 the proportio…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…e story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few things that make a society more vulnerable to trauma. “A society emerging from a major war, suffering from diminished economic r…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…is time, her questions were more nuanced. She wants to read Barack Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which is frequently referenced in the movie. She really wants to read George Obama’s book, Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival. She’d like to understand more about race relations, colonialism, corporate welfare policies, the American political system, and how all of these impact our environment….

Virtual Book Burning and Its Consequences

By Laurie Patton

…ayed ignorance of the contents of the Qur’an (an all-too-frequent trait of book burners), he intuitively knew that book burning could involve all three aspects of this complex symbol. It could be a politically purifying act on the part of the dominant institution, a way of clarifying religious canon, as well as an act of protest on the part of a religious minority. And in his rhetoric, Jones used all three stances involving the symbolism of the bo…

Lesbian Nuns: Still Immodest After All These Years

By Susan Henking

…ook but I was surprised at the extent and variety of contexts in which the book appeared. I expected the book might be read in history, religious studies, women’s studies, and sexuality studies courses. I did not expect that the book would have a wide readership outside of academic circles, so when it did, it was really gratifying. Among the most moving experiences I’ve had is meeting women in non-academic settings who mention the book and tell m…

God Makes an Independent Film

By Eric Zassenhaus

…oduced epic whose filming it chronicles, just as Jacobs’ rigidly objective directorial style is in stark contrast with that of the larger-than-life director he examines. In fact, Jacobs’ camera is meek to the point of self-effacing—except for a murmured question thrown out to a cast member here and there, Jacobs is almost completely absent. His camera leaves WYSIWYG’s cast of eccentric characters exposed to the viewer’s interpretation as foolish,…

From Organized Religion to Organizing Religion: Brian D. McLaren Wants Christians to Be Better

By Peter Laarman

…a new love-centered Christian orientation (note the silhouette of birds in flight on the book jacket), McLaren also speaks of conversion, and I read the book more through the conversion lens (I’m not sure that the migration metaphor works as well as the author hoped it might). The tone throughout is warm and engaging, and the book is filled with telling anecdotes. But McLaren is never less than a master teacher with a solid lesson plan. He moves,…