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What Do ‘The Christians’ Believe? Easter Reflections from a Non-Christian

By Gary Laderman

…ess of this scandal and what role, if any, he had in how the situation was mishandled at the Vatican, reminding his followers about the true mission of the church and to focus on Jesus Christ. What do the Christians believe? The recent health care debates surfaced the radical differences that exist among Christians about health and care. On the one side are conservative Christians who see in the recent legislative victory for President Obama nothi…

Holy Father, You’re Not Helping: The Problem with the Pope’s Plan to Consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

By Katherine Kelaidis

…s difficult not to notice that the West—the rich, powerful twin—has seldom missed an opportunity to leverage Eastern Christian misfortune to its own advantage. The Crusades themselves are an excellent example, but Catholic power grabs in places like Ukraine during the 16th century around the fall of Constantinople also demonstrate this problem. Which brings us back to Thursday’s consecration. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which holds…

Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army

By Peter Montgomery

…lar Serene Jones by Elijah Prewitt-Davis.) But it is clear that Beck is dismissing the faith of millions when he creates a simplistic label—‘individual’ or ‘collective’—and declares the latter to be un-Christian. For many Christians, says J. Brent Walker of the Baptist Joint Committee, it’s a both/and, an individual decision nurtured by a church community. Max Carter, a Friends minister (and, like Walker, a commenter on a recent Washington Post On…

Orthodox Jews Begin to Reckon with Sexual Abuse

By Paul Berger

…take. And only if the beth din deems the allegation to be true will the family be permitted to go to the authorities. Ocean County Prosecutor Marlene Lynch Ford, who brought the case against Yosef Kolko, is concerned that such actions limit a prosecutor’s ability to secure a conviction. “By having a diversion to a different type of tribunal, no matter how well intentioned the people involved are, it ultimately makes the job of getting a criminal…

New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

…drawn the attention of some authorities: The trend of prosecuting “blasphemies” shared through social media is most marked in Muslim-majority countries. For example, in addition to the tragic, but all too familiar, wave of blasphemy prosecutions in Pakistan, this year saw prosecutions for allegedly atheist comments on Facebook and Twitter in Bangladesh, Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey. In some of these cases,…

My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

By Howard M. Friedman

…n do have constitutional rights. A corporation cannot be convicted of a criminal offense without the protections given by the Constitution to criminal defendants. And in the famous 2010 Citizens United case, the Supreme Court held that corporations have the same First Amendment rights of political speech that “real people” do. If the First Amendment has been interpreted to guarantee a corporation’s free speech rights, does it also have free religi…

Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

By Jhas Williams

…to be the most damaging to my psyche. For the subsequent three years, in a million PTSD-inducing ways, I would be regularly reminded that my Black life was either worth very little or that it was, in no uncertain terms, altogether “sinful.” Obviously it wasn’t always the overt-racism that communicated such idiocy, like being called a nigger to my face by white men who claimed to have a closer relationship with God than I did. (Although for the rec…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…conflicted devout. Just ten years ago this wasn’t so. The George W. Bush administration, in which millennials came of age, was reigned over by a simple, angry deity who made one-dimensional characterizations of God more readily available than complex ones. The God-Rock genre had a decent run in the 1990s and early aughts, but its contents lacked theological rigor. More wholesome bands like Jars of Clay essentially sang praise anthems while an angs…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

Mitt Romney’s delusional 2012 pollsters got nothing on apologists for last week’s Pew Poll that found no real “Francis effect” from the pope’s first year. According to Daniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to fin…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…