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In Praise of Failure: Is Defining Religion Such a Good Idea?

By Ivan Strenski

…unty, California, I am writing close in time and space to the shootings in San Bernardino. I have been driven to distraction and anger by the way the word “terrorism” is kicked about. For example: mass shootings by a white Christian, “crazy, unexplainable,” but, mass shootings by a Muslim, “terrorism,” without question. As it happens, Linker writes as if there is something like “terrorism” out there too—only he is writing about religion as if ther…

Do Women Have a Future in the Catholic Church? Social Justice Orgs Petition Bishops This Week

By Patricia Miller

…te A Church for Our Daughters today at the bishops’ semi-annual meeting in San Diego. The groups participating include advocates for women priests, such as the Association of Roman Catholic Womenpriests and the Women’s Ordination Conference, the Catholic LGBT equality groups DignityUSA and New Ways Ministry, the Catholic reproductive rights group Catholics for Choice, and Catholic reform organizations such as Call to Action and FutureChurch. The p…

Welcome to the Gayborhood: Jason Brown on This New Era

By The Editors

…hood.” I’ve lived, you know, like, among the straights. So when I moved to San Diego it was like okay, I’m going to I’m going to live in the gay area. I’m going to reach out to gay people and to gay Christians. In the gayborhood, (my partner) Josh and I don’t worry about being in public together. Like, holding hands, we don’t have so much fear of doing it. We don’t get looked at. We’ve certainly shed any sense of guilt that that we might have had…

Why The Church Can’t Stop Gun Violence

By Daniel Schultz

…more liberal denominations split on gun control, they’re distracted by any number of other issues: hunger, homelessness, anti-racism, advocating for LGBT rights, refugee resettlement, Israel-Palestine and on and on and on. Anybody who’s spent time in a mainline Protestant church knows that it seems like there’s a new cause every damn day. It’s difficult to coalesce around any one issue. As if that weren’t bad enough, the ongoing self-segregation o…

Pope Francis, the Bouncer

By Anthea Butler

…t recent revelation comes after comments he made at a working class church San Cirillo Allessandro, on the outskirts of Rome on the first Sunday of Advent. According to L’Osservatore Romano, the Pope told parishioners he had once been a bouncer, but that his work later in life teaching psychology and literature taught him how to get people back into the church. No surprise then, that Pope Francis is punching high and low at his internal and extern…

The Battle for the Bible Against Christian Nationalism Seeks to Continue Historic Campaign

By Frederick Clarkson

…may be surprised to learn that Wendsler Nosie Sr., former chairman of the San Carlos Apaches and a non-Christian, was at the center of an event that may someday be seen as a quiet turning point in the history of the struggle against the Christian Right. The Battle for the Bible: Christian Nationalism and the Movement to End Poverty, a one-day conference held in late January, went entirely unnoticed by the media. But the event nevertheless highlig…

The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain and Michelle Goldberg

…eel like they’re doing something altruistic when they’re performing their asanas. Much as I love asana practice, I don’t believe this. Do you? I’d like to hear your thoughts about yoga and politics. Modern yoga culture seems vaguely progressive, but a lot of the underlying ideas are about an escape from politics. AJ: I think Devi’s emphasis on self-cultivation at the loss of attention to social justice is alive and well among many practitioners of…

Replacing Godless Hollywood with Bible-Based “Cultural Dominion”

By Julie Ingersoll

…ts, and the other dread enemies of God’s plan for a Christian America, the San Antonio Christian Film Festival, which begins next week, provides a telling window. The Festival, the culmination of the 2010 Christian Filmmakers’ Academy, which features Hollywood’s most outspoken evangelical Kirk Cameron as a “faculty” member, intends to create a “Christ-honoring replacement industry outside of Hollywood.” Replacing godless Hollywood with a Christian…

Arrest the Pope: New Atheist Effort to Seek Justice in Sexual Abuse Crisis Should Be Applauded

By Frances Kissling

…ite a civil lawsuit that was filed against him in 2002. And last year, the San Antonio (TX) Express News reported that Miller “was forced to resign two years ago after a (credible) claim that he sexually abused (a St. Louis teenager), but was sent to his superiors to live and work for the church in Rome. SNAP, and now Dawkins, et al are frequently criticized as “too angry” or “too radical.” Their insistence that the Catholic Church and its leaders…

Literary Critic George Steiner, Whose Views on Anti-Semitism Drew Controversy, Dies at 90

By Ed Simon

…d to put an aged Hitler on trial in the Amazon forest after their reconnaissance mission to retrieve him and bring him to Israel for trial has failed. Provocative ideas were Steiner’s medium. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, published in 1971, Steiner asked not just of where God was in the nihilism of the Shoah, but of how we’re to possibly understand anything as obscene as “culture” in the aftermath of such m…