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LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…t when I have 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. (…

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

By Paul Wallace

…doing? On what do they base their arguments? To what are they paying obeisance? Science, or at least something that goes by that name. What loyal opposition! They have fully agreed to play at science’s ballpark, to speak the language of science, to identify truth with factuality. The reason creationists are so upset about evolution is because science works and they know it. They’re awed by it, over-awed perhaps, and they feel the heat. They feel i…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…er at Box Turtle Bulletin points out, Yarhouse has long been touting his conclusions that ex-gay ministries are “helpful.” Kincaid gives some background on Yarhouse, and his colleague, Rob Tisinai, gives a better breakdown of what the numbers really mean—and it isn’t a rousing success story about “change.” “Out of 98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexua…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…it with Passover, as the Orthodox still do). There were some other differences as well, including the style of tonsure, or haircut, worn by Irish monks, but otherwise the faith as believed by Christians in northwestern Europe was the essentially the same as that promulgated at the Council of Nicaea in 325, the same Christianity as that in Rome. The idea that Celtic Christianity was uniquely different, perhaps even in opposition to Roman Christian…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…s remarks came in response to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ recent announcement that insurance plans will be required to offer contraception without copay, unless they meet the conditions allowing for a religious exemption. The HHS guidelines follow recent recommendations issued by the Institute of Medicine. Included are contraceptive methods like IUDs and tubal ligations which have a high upfront cost but, when offered for free, may be especia…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…tempts at definitive interpretation. Multiply ambiguous, it is a strange concoction of any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…rmed to believe otherwise and reporters should not accept appeals to tolerance uncritically. Turning Up the Heat I thought of Leonard when I first heard this story. He’s someone who had a real clash between religion and sexuality and chose in favor of the first. And I believe that his experience in his ex-gay ministry, like some other ex-gays I interviewed, was a positive one for him. But the difference between Leonard and Wyler is that Leonard wa…

From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

By Daniel Schultz

…ife goes on, one way or another. At the same time, it seems spectacularly incompatible with the declared teachings of most religions to act so recklessly when so many lives are in the balance. So I’d like to propose a variation on Pascal’s famous wager: if you act as though COVID-19 were a real menace and you turn out to be wrong, you’ve lost nothing more than a few handshakes in church. But, if you blow the threat off and it turns out to be much…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…d by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), with 300 being incidences of pedophilia, and 600 priests defrocked in a ten-year period. These cases, according to Monsignor Charles J. Scicluna, represented sexual abuse cases that had occurred over the last fifty years. Unfortunately, this is a very small percentage of the cases worldwide, in part because Scicluna states that between 1975 and 1985, “I do not believe that any cases of ped…

Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

By Brock Bahler

…the same Netanyahu rhetoric also resonates with American Christians who, since 9/11 (and even more so since 2016), have been fed a steady stream of portrayals of Muslims as terrorists and barbarians such that, even in 2021, 74% of Republicans and 50% of all Americans agreed with the statement: “Islam is at odds with American values and ways of life.” In other words, to be an American is to be a Christian. Therefore, since Muslims are portrayed as…