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“The Lord’s Standard of Morality” Promotes LDS Rape Culture

By Holly Welker

…s for a very long time. When I arrived at the Missionary Training Center in 1985, sisters had to attend a 6 a.m. gym class. Even though it ended early enough that we were the only ones on the sidewalks during the very short trip back to our dorms, we still had to wear either sweat pants or shorts with tights under them—no bare legs—so that in the unlikely event that a young man ventured from his dorm early, he would not be overcome by lust at the…

Will Righteous Mormons Still Get their Own Planets?

By Holly Welker

…meaning that we were all conceived in the preexistence through some act of spiritual procreation. However guarded its wording, the essay does at least acknowledge LDS belief in a Heavenly Mother: “Latter-day Saints have also been moved by the knowledge that their divine parentage includes a Heavenly Mother as well as a Heavenly Father.” The doctrine that male and female human beings may become gods has been absolutely foundational to LDS belief—it…

‘Let It Be Unto Me’: Akin, Rape, and the Early Church

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…pretive chasm” separating two versions of the same story; the first told in 1752 and the second in 1836. A monk is told to keep watch over the body of a girl whose family believes has recently died, but instead forces himself upon her sexually. In the morning, it turns out that she is not dead, but was just in a coma. In due course it becomes clear that she is pregnant. In the 1752 version it is assumed that the monk must have known she was alive,…

Promise Keepers Launches Effort to Support Messianic Jews in Israel

By Sarah Posner

…Himself, prayed that these Jewish believers would be unified with the vast numbers of Gentile believers, resulting in the world recognizing that He was truly sent by God.” The September 17 event, which will be held at an outdoor amphitheater outside the Old City walls, is called “Jesus Reigns,” and is part of Promise Keepers’ new “sister” ministry, “One Message,” which is not exclusively for men, spokesman David Jesse told me. The event, he said,…

The Search For Proofs For God’s Existence

By Gordon Haber

…n years coming to terms with the experience of converting to Catholicism at 18, and that process caused me to read a lot of dead writers. In the course of reading them through the lens of my own experience, it became clear that the ideas of these writers were products of experience—and anguish and struggle—as well as of abstract thought. Most histories of theistic proofs today, however, leave out the experience and focus only on the abstraction. I…

On Whistleblowing, MLK, Jr., and the Politics of Resistance in the Digital Age

By Kevin Healey

…stood sermon that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright made shortly after September 11, 2001, where he drew from Psalm 137 to denounce the cycle of violence that would soon be perpetuated by the Bush administration’s belligerent response. It is not a message that plays well in commercial media, yet it is a necessary argument since, as Cage argued, the violent opposition to established power leads us not toward liberation but merely allows us to “change pr…

Public Religion in a Post-Christian Age, Graduation Edition

By David Gushee

…hour’s time. I found the sheer rhetorical emptiness of the events deeply dispiriting. Graduation meant nothing other than being done with school. No evidence for any broader purpose for education, or for life, was offered or could be discerned. Single-faith: My oldest child graduated from both a conservative Christian high school and conservative Baptist college, in west Tennessee, before we moved to Atlanta. These schools did not hesitate to off…

A Dismayed Democrat Reads the Bible

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…f Paul, like 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, and near the end of chapter 15 [in 1 Corinthians] he speaks as if this might happen while he is still alive. One big difference is he thought it was very, very soon from his point in time. Also, there is no reference to what Christians in our time refer to as ‘The Rapture,’ the notion that seven years before the second coming of Jesus, true-believing Christians will be taken up into heaven to be spar…

DNC Platform, Thy Name is Esther

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…n, even though they take God’s name in vain a few times). Without ever mentioning God, the DNC platform, perhaps less poetically than the writer of Song of Songs, still captures the spirit perfectly: “Love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave… Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…taxonomies—good bodies and bad bodies, dirty acts and pure acts, flesh and spirit, those in authority and those under authority. I think that tendency has hurt people, and I think it’s implicated in rape culture. And that matters: this is not an interesting little theological problem for specialists to rub their chins over and try to work out in the abstract. But. You know what? I just can’t, right now, mock the parents on Preachers’ Daughters fo…