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Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

By Elesha Coffman

…s in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a seminary, but they were often quite jarring for faculty and…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…to date was HPA for the Win in June 2010, during which HPA mobilized huge numbers of online voters from across fandoms and online communities to win a $250,000 grant from the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Then there’s the current “Deathly Hallows” campaign, which centers on the release date of a Harry Potter movie—in this case, The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on Nov. 19. The Deathly Hallows campaign will run for nine months—the time bet…

Global Anti-Gay Forces Plot Against ‘Satanic’ Equality Movement

By Peter Montgomery

…by Orthodox Church officials, was backed by diplomats and activists from a number of European countries. European Parliament acting head Alexandra Attalides said the Parliament stood at the forefront of campaigns for human rights. “A country cannot be European unless there are equal rights for all. Today we are proud,” she said. Political party representatives voiced support for civil partnership, with organisers noting that human rights could not…

Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

By Bill Berkowitz

…eliefs have been dissected over the years, the core religious beliefs of a number of White nationalist movement leaders has received far less attention. Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream Leonard Zeskind Farrar, Straus and Giroux May, 2009 I recently had the opportunity to talk with Zeskind, a friend and colleague, about his new book, the role these religious beliefs played in the d…

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

By Kelsey Osgood

…mblazoned in our cultural consciousness. On November 18, 1978, the largest number of American civilian lives was lost due to a single non-natural disaster—a sad distinction Jonestown would hold until September 11, 2001. In Stories from Jonestown, the most recent addition to the Jonestown library, Leigh Fondakowski has compiled the numerous interviews that she conducted in order to write her play, The People’s Temple, which ran at the Berkeley Rep…

Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

By Brittany Shoot

…xperiments), she began to question the idea of devotion to a guru. After a number of attempts to leave, she broke free of the group at age twenty-five. I recently caught up with Tamm to talk about Sri Chinmoy’s death, her use of the word “cult,” and what her spiritual life looks like today. ** Did it make a difference to his followers that Sri Chinmoy was from India? Did it give him extra authority? In the late 1960s, there was a trend to look to…

Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies

By Todd LeVasseur

…nature in economics. Most of the rest of my argument builds on data point number 5, focusing on how religious studies (as if that’s a monolithic thing) to date has talked about the natural world. I share the below as someone who is at the core of my training a religionist who’s vested in using education to build a better, more sustainable society. I recognize that understanding the role of religion in society is of import as we work toward this g…

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…rts struck it down, the environment has proved too dangerous for a growing number of Ugandans. But in Kenya they face constant attacks, kidnappings, extortion and police harassment. Recently, almost a dozen LGBT people were taken by the United Nation’s refugee agency (UNHCR) to a safe house in Nairobi, after they were attacked on a night out. Even that agency – the very group tasked with protected LGBT people – has admitted its own staff are hosti…

My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

By Kathryn Joyce

…the babies” themselves, both saving money and demonstrating their faith. A number of Quiverfull families follow a similar arc (as had Garrison) graduating from conventional hospital births—often where mothers felt pushed into a birth plan they didn’t desire—to midwife-assisted births at home, to the final challenge of unattended home births. It’s a logical extreme of the movement whose naturalistic bent actually overlaps with the back-to-the-land,…

Is Obama the Antichrist? Why Armageddon Stands Between the President and the Evangelical Vote

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…ts, a hidden “plan of the ages” emerges. According to their decryptions, a number of events will transpire just before the apocalypse. These include a return of the Jews to Palestine, a decline in morals, religious apostasy, and the consolidation of independent nations into one super-state led by a seemingly benevolent leader who is actually the Antichrist. During the last 100 years, evangelicals have witnessed more and more evidence of these prop…