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Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

By Katherine Stewart

…he one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” The right to the free exercise of re…

Speaking with Palestinian-American Republican Who Confronted GOP at Debate

By Haroon Moghul

…d his “massive family” are part of “a vast Palestinian community… in North Florida, nearly all of them Greek Orthodox or Catholic.” But Hassan gets the anti-Muslim bigotry, especially because it comes back to haunt him (he, an Arab Christian American, is tarred with Islamist Hamas). For those in the GOP who might be reading this, allow me to tell you: The percentage of Christians among the Palestinian population is about the same as the percentage…

Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

By Marian Ronan

…and representatives of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) flying to Rome to defend themselves from accusations of “radical feminism.” One of the meanings of this “radical feminism,” in case you’re wondering, is that the LCWR “never revoked a statement from 1977 that questioned the male-only priesthood,” and has failed to speak out against gay marriage, as Laurie Goodstein notes in the New York Times. But in this world of balloonin…

Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

By Daniel Schultz

…mpanion kept 95.7% of it.) It’s possible this is part of a larger trend. A number of paragraphs down there’s mention of a long-delayed vote on the future of the denomination, which might lend credibility to the headline, but no details are given, so it’s not possible to evaluate the claim. Likewise, near the top of the story comes a paragraph with a quote from an RCA pastor about the financial difficulties this will create. Does he speak for the d…

How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

By Christopher D. Cantwell

…of the whole. Noll even ends the collection with yet another metaphorical flourish, suggesting that scholars no longer think of evangelicalism as a religious “World Series,” where events in the United States determine a victor, but as a “World Cup,” where an international diversity of teams are on display. There’s a certain irony here, in that an Anglophone movement that once saw itself as uniquely positioned to save the world is now looking to t…

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ark change from the immediate post-Soviet period. Recent years have seen a flurry of church construction throughout the country. And perhaps most important of all, there’s a committed believer—Vladimir Putin—in the Kremlin, a man who surrounds himself with other influential people of faith and regularly invokes God in his public statements. Yet all is not as rosy for the Orthodox Church as it appears on the surface. The blurring of the line betwee…

New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

By Chrissy Stroop

…corresponding figures for them are 73% and 71%, the trend remaining almost flat and perhaps going down. The trend also remained flat among Jewish Americans (44%), but got worse among the religiously unaffiliated, leaping from 38% to 46%. While the understanding of gender as strictly binary or as nonbinary may not be a perfect indicator of trans acceptance overall, given the prominent place of the binary in anti-trans rhetoric, I think these attitu…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…damentally post-racist country, the racists “are just a few idiots,” not a number tallied in the millions. In “conservatism,” the intellectual legacy of the Confederacy has been normalized and an entire population of Negrophobes is absorbed into society and allowed space to push their anti-Black agenda everywhere from the Senate floor to bank cubicles. It’s been said that politics is the continuation of war by other means. After the surrender at A…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…ave asserted the Christianity of Mormon belief for national audiences, the number one reaction has come from Christians who seek to correct my understanding of my faith and remind me that Mormons are not, in their eyes, Christians. Some assert that they’ll be praying for my mistaken soul (and the soul of my Jewish husband too). Others seek to engage in a friendlier conversational exchange about whether Mormons profess the Nicene Creed. (We do not…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…. Rosenbaum addresses the fetishizing of fMRI images, the ideology that conflates causation and correlation, and the shifting semantics — evil recast as “non-empathy” by one esteemed psychologist (echoing, interestingly, the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation). But it’s the image of scientists as priests that caught my attention. It’s an image that has a lot going for it. Before I say what exactly it has going for it, howev…