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New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…dy that purports to show that “children raised by homosexual parents are dramatically more likely than peers raised by married heterosexual parents to suffer from a host of social problems.” Calling this study “the gold standard” of same-sex parenting studies, FoF’s afﬁliate CitizenLink crowed that among those “social problems” were “strong tendencies, as adults, to exhibit poor impulse control; suffer from depression and thoughts of suicide; need…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…rmal encyclicals and other documents that leave the permanent mark of his papacy on the church. One could argue, therefore, that the lack of alignment between the priorities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Francis wasn’t a willful rejection of the pope’s agenda, but more of a wait-and-see attitude of exactly what that agenda was and how it could be implemented in concrete detail. But the jig is up. Its been nearly three years. The p…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…l Holiness Theology and Gender in the South Colin B. Chapell University of Alabama Press September 2016 What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Theology and belief matter to how people view not only the world around them, but how adherents view their own identity. I know that this may sound simple, but we so often forget this. Indeed, I would enlarge that statement to say that the values people hold dearest change how they underst…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…gays and lesbians were singlehandedly responsible for taking old houses in abandoned neighborhoods and turning them into revitalized homes and neighborhoods. The turnaround was so astounding that one year, the best sign at Atlanta’s gay pride read: “We can rehab marriage and sell it back to you at twice the price.” Seems that sign was a bit prescient. As more and more states accept same-sex marriage, researchers are showing that gays and lesbians…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…surrecting and playing with the dead. While I have a predilection for the macabre generally, and tend to be a little too preoccupied with the dead specifically, I am not opposed to the celebratory, harmless Halloween activities associated with dressing up in outlandish costumes, knocking on strangers’ doors, and consuming lots and lots and lots of candy. Perhaps at some subterranean, unconscious societal level, as we get closer to the day of elect…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…red him for his fiercely confident, direct, and demanding guidance at his Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune and far beyond. Iyengar’s widespread influence can be attributed to his success in constructing and disseminating what is known as “Iyengar Yoga,” an idiosyncratic rendition of modern postural yoga, a complex and contested collection of systems consisting of some combination of asana, or “posture,” synchronized with the breath…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…law claims to offer exceptions for medical emergencies, rape, incest, and fatal fetal anomalies, these exceptions are so vaguely written they’ll be virtually impossible to access. A Planned Parenthood-led lawsuit successfully blocked the law’s implementation since Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature approved the ban over a year ago, but the state’s Supreme Court ended the reprieve in June by overturning the lower court’s injunction. In doing…

Mormon Rejection of Trump Embarrassing for Evangelicals?

By Neil J. Young

…In a recent article for Religion News Service, the popular Mormon blogger Jana Reiss suggested a few more reasons why Trump has a Mormon problem, including his demeaning treatment of women and his inauthentic claim to faith. The Mormon rejection of Trump also serves to further magnify Trump’s strange success among evangelical voters. While the evangelical magazine Christianity Today recently pointed out that the majority of evangelicals aren’t sup…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…or his bit part in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Expelled makes the claim that Academic Science has erected a wall around itself and the theory of evolution, and that anyone, including scientists, who dares to question evolution, who tries to scale that wall, is ostracized by the system. This, according to the movie, is an affront to freedom, a basic right upon which America was built. The movie focuses on five or six folks (all of whom are challengin…

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…evelation, for example—as metaphorical. Thus, the Qur’an promises that in Paradise, there will be gardens, running water, and ripe fruits. The righteous will be clad in silk and recline on couches, ready to be waited on and to receive the attention of houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to t…