Giving Up God—Not Just a Spiritual Stunt
“One of the perks of being an atheist is not having to do [traditional worship] anymore. I’ve been in the religion business all my life and I just need a break.”
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U.S. Bishops’ 15–year Battle For ‘Conscience’ and Against Contraception
How Viagra and the Pill brought the U.S. Bishops back into the battle against birth control and into the ‘religious freedom’ business.
Read MoreOn Whistleblowing, MLK, Jr., and the Politics of Resistance in the Digital Age
“We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to co-operate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.”
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Pigging Out: What ‘Radically Unkosher’ Jewish Foodies Like Michael Pollan Are Missing
While Jewish foodies frequently use “traditional cultures” to critique everything from the cruelty and impact of modern agribusiness, to the lack of pleasure and meaning we derive from our food, they flout their own tradition when it comes to eating pig meat to the detriment of their greater goals.
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Climate Change is a Sin—Here’s How to Repent For It
The mistake isn’t that progressives don’t see climate change as a sin. We do, even if we don’t call it that. The mistake is that we respond to it the wrong way.
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Naked Mormon Women Go Viral, Talk Back
“I’d be lying if I didn’t have the occasional moment of shock and shyness, or wondering what on earth I was thinking when I decided to put my boobs on the internet, but aside from worrying that my mother-in-law or my boss is going to find out some day, I don’t fear what anyone thinks about it.”
Read MoreUnbuckling the Bible Belt: “Nashville” and the Nones
The choices and consequences on “Nashville”—ABC’s popular drama, returning on January 15—are shaped not by evangelical faith, but by redemptive crusades to achieve an awkward, messy, and ambiguous sense of moral and musical purity. By exchanging the role of traditional southern Christianity for postmodern Bible Belt spirituality, the show brings the South into conformity with the shifting demographics of the rest of the country.
Read MoreAs Cambodia Erupts in Protest, a Stolen Buddhist Relic Ignites Anger
“I was quite shocked upon learning of the relic’s loss,” said former prime minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh in a rare public statement released days after the disappearance. “As a Buddhist and the one who listed Buddhism as the state religion in the 1993 constitution, I am extremely sad, completely grievous for the loss of the Buddha relics which were a happy, peaceful, prosperous, and holy thing for our respectful country.”
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The Trouble With Francis: Three Things That Worry Me
Substantive structural and doctrinal issues do not evaporate just because the pope does not wear Prada.
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The Irony of the American Studies Israel Boycott
In an effort to create “solidarity” with Palestinian suffering the ASA voted to support a boycott of a nation whose injustices are underwritten by the “A” in the ASA’s name.
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