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The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…in the spring of 2014, when zombie courses had long been on the books at a number of institutions across the United States, in literature courses and sociology classes and beyond. Scholars like Kim Paffenroth and Kelly Baker, among others, had already firmly established the relevance and importance of studying zombies and other monsters within the field of religious studies more broadly. Yet between the excellent work of CMU’s media team and the s…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…se sojourn, I heard the distinctly flat-accented voices of men from the American Midwest waft up from the street through an open window in my second-floor hotel room. One of the voices belonged to Heuertz, but the others I didn’t recognize. A few moments later, I encountered three big middle-aged guys from Wisconsin with rucksacks strapped to their backs, dressed like a cross between trekkers and construction workers, which is, essentially, what t…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…ize without interference in free and fair representation elections. By the Numbers The cold, hard facts are these: Polls consistently report that 60 million Americans would join a union tomorrow if they could, which clearly suggests that there’s something wrong with the current system for allowing workers to decide this question. Just going by official National Labor Relations Board numbers (which surely underestimate the magnitude of violation),…

Transgender and Christian: Finding Identity

By Jori Lewis

…reassignment surgery (a process many people call “the transition”), so the number of transgender-identified people is likely much higher. The term “transgender” encompasses anyone with a gender identity that is different from his or her birth sex. A transgender person could be someone who just cross-dresses from time to time in private; someone who identifies as gender-queer (that is, neither male nor female); someone who is just taking hormones b…

As New Poll Finds “Increased Xenophobic Streak,” Republicans Heighten Anti-Muslim Rhetoric

By Sarah Posner

…c than other groups,” the report notes, “with majorities believing that America’s best days are behind us (60% and 55%, respectively).” But majorities of Americans affiliated with other religious groups, including non-Christian religions, Catholics, black Protestants, and the unaffiliated “all believe America’s best days are ahead of us.” Jones called the pessimism/optimism gap a “deep cultural divide,” associated with a perceived decline in the i…

PCUSA’s Nod to “Traditional” Marriage Understandable, but Not Accurate

By William E. Smith

…t and change. Many of these developments, furthermore, continue to shape a number of the assumptions American Christians have about the nature of marriage. Consider the following examples of historical changes in Christian marriage and whether we can honestly still call today’s version “traditional.” 1) Were individuals always required to be conventionally alive? For the majority of the past two thousand years, Christian women could marry Jesus, w…

The Suppression of Sin in Evangelical Abolitionism: The Wilberforce Problem

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…part, due to attention to the issue from the evangelical media machine. A number of books have been published by Christian presses in recent years with titles like God in the Brothel: An Undercover Journey into Sex Trafficking and Rescue, The Slave Across the Street: A True Story of How an American Teen Survived the World of Human Trafficking, and Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women. The latter, written by Carolyn Custis Ja…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…itutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a reference to…

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

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…” while simultaneously witnessing the apparent evaporation of cherished American values. They responded by reverting to apocalyptic jeremiads. This was most evident in the runaway success of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. At the same time evangelicals, although scorning Hollywood, turned to modern technology to preach Armageddon. The result was the cult phenomenon A Thief in the Night, an…

Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

By Lynne Gerber

…onnections and overlaps between homosexuality and fatness and eating in American culture. There’s an article to be written on American moral crusaders who wrote about both issues. Peter Wyden, an executive editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, wrote popular books on each, and there are others. I wasn’t able to include much on fatness, weight loss, and social class—an issue that interests me a great deal and that I’ve written about elsewhere. What’s the…