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New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…cal Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Association of Social Workers, “who all conﬁrm that LGBT parents make good parents,” Freedom to Marry reiterated. No study is ever perfect, and Gartrell acknowledges limitations in her study, including the fact that the families who participated are a nonrandom sample. Such limitations were understandable in the 1980s when the study began since “ the targeted population was lar…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…does the voter make a decision, it tilts in favor of abortion and euthanasia and excludes poverty and the environment.” The most aggressive revisions the bishops did make to “Faithful Citizenship” were to beef up references to their opposition to same-sex marriage, which now total nine, changes that National Catholic Reporter blogger Michael Sean Winters notes “clearly are designed to make it lean more to the right and to the GOP.” The final stra…

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

By Colin Chapell

…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…who also understand that gays and lesbians can do a lot to “redefine” marriage in beneficial ways. Rev. Ed Bacon, who leads the 4,000 member All Saints Church in Pasadena, Calif., told Oprah Winfrey this past weekend that marriage would be “enriched” by same-sex couples. I’ve never had a straight couple come to me and say, ‘My marriage is in trouble because of the gay couple living next door.’ To the contrary, I’ve had people come to me and say,…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…the Christian conquest of paganism, what we know as Halloween became associated with certain Christian hallowed days, in particular All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. These institutional formalities brought martyrs and saints, angels, and prayers for the dead into the picture, and generally kept the dead firmly in sight, either as exemplars to be followed, in the case of Christian heroes, or, in the case of Christian laity, as still-vital relati…

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

By Andrea R. Jain

…hich functioned as the center for teacher training, greatly augmented the number of yoga teachers who received official training in Iyengar Yoga and became the headquarters from which to disseminate the Iyengar system. Today, there are thousands of Iyengar Yoga teachers and millions of practitioners in over seventy countries across the world. Some yoga advocates and pop culture critics have suggested that popularized yoga reflects only the impuls…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…luding future and existing children. One of the women interviewed, a Christian, pregnant by an abusive partner, described how she made her abortion decision through “[a] lot of praying, a lot of talking to God.” She concluded that God “would not want me to be in a situation for the rest of my life or [for] a child to be in a situation for the rest of its life to be tortured by somebody.” A Catholic woman with two children who terminated a medicall…

Mormon Rejection of Trump Embarrassing for Evangelicals?

By Neil J. Young

…Trump’s strange success among evangelical voters. While the evangelical magazine Christianity Today recently pointed out that the majority of evangelicals aren’t supporting Trump, that doesn’t change the fact that in the Southern Bible states where Trump has won he has done so in part by capturing the largest share of evangelical voters in the state. Trump nearly doubled Cruz’s share of evangelicals in the Alabama primary, winning 43 percent to Cr…

American Christianity Is Changing Fast: Five Stories to Watch in 2016

By Richard Flory

…Mainline Protestant congregations in the mix. They appeal to an increasing desire among many Christians to be in smaller, more intimate communities and to be an active member in the neighborhoods where they are located. These churches tend to think of themselves as a family environment that is as much focused on its surrounding neighborhoods as it is on its own members. Even megachurches are getting in on the act by establishing franchised outpost…

An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

By Anne Eggebroten

…y’re certainly not acting like they believe in a God that watches. A Christian is supposed to ask ‘What would Jesus do?’ and try to do it. Would Jesus have covered up for decades all of this abuse?” Like many others, O’Connor has chosen not to leave the church but to work for change. Her most dramatic call for change came in 1992 when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II as protest against child sexual abuse on Saturday Night Live. She and oth…