Reading Time: 4 minutes By the time I hit puberty, my mother had left her Catholic body-shaming god behind. Her message to me was simple: Everybody’s got one.
Christianity
Posted inReligious News
Essendon CEO quits after backlash due to his Christian bigotry
Reading Time: 4 minutes Andrew Thorburn resigned as CEO of the Essendon football team in Australia less than 24 hours after taking on the new job due to widespread backlash over his other job: chairing a Christian church that promotes anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion views. Those bigoted ideas stood in stark contrast to the more progressive values of the football club, […]
Posted inReligion
The many red flags Gracepoint Church waved
Reading Time: 14 minutes In a very real sense, Gracepoint weaponized the deepest yearnings and aches of its prey, then played upon their deepest fears to gain their ongoing compliance.
Posted inEthics and Morality
To forgive or not to forgive
Reading Time: 9 minutes Raised Roman Catholic, I was indoctrinated in childhood with the idea that forgiveness is a cardinal duty of faith, which then saddled me with knee-jerk guilt whenever I failed to bestow it. But as I think objectively about this moral ethos many decades later, I’m unconvinced it’s essential for human harmony and contentment. In fact, […]
Posted inLaw
Originalism: Why is the US Constitution being held hostage in 1788?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Whenever the deeply conservative ideology of “originalism” versus “living constitutionalism” is raised, we should remind ourselves of the sordid history of American slavery that the US Constitution once purposefully accommodated. More on that later. Because five current religiously devout US Supreme Court justices—a majority—are widely considered “originalists,” a closer consideration of this reactionary ideology has […]
Posted inReligion
The Bible story reboots
Reading Time: 3 minutes Let’s look at the repeated story lines in which God makes an everlasting covenant with his people. There’s a The End, and then the story lurches forward with another reboot.
Posted inReligious News
Survey: How authentic are Christian evangelicals? Not very
Reading Time: 2 minutes “American evangelicals, it turns out, have a Jesus problem.” This quote by self-described evangelical Christian Republican David French came in a September 23 post of his newsletter, “The Third Rail” in The Atlantic. Referencing a report released last week on a biannual survey by conservative Christian organizations LifeWay Research and Ligonier Ministries, French notes that the […]
Posted inReligion
The evolution of religion and the rise of the nones
Reading Time: 4 minutes The decline of Christianity in the United States does not mean that “religion” is dead or dying. News of the death of religion may excite humanists, but it is unlikely to go extinct. Religion is an adaptable social phenomenon. Religious beliefs and behaviors have always evolved. In a free country, this evolution will continue. Secularism […]
Posted inReligious News
The murder of Mahsa Amini: Is this what happens when religion rules?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Last week, Mahsa Amini died from an alleged “heart attack” while in police custody during a visit to Tehran, the capital of Iran. Her crime? Showing her hair. Amini’s murder has sparked mass protests and at least 17 deaths across Iran as well as global outrage in the days since. For Americans, it is all […]
Posted inPolitics
Voters hammered Trump in 2016. So how did he end up president?
Reading Time: 4 minutes You may be unaware of it, but the Democratic Party has been on quite a win streak of late, capturing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections (1992-2020), including when Donald Trump won the White House in 2016. The question is, how was Trump able to win that election when he […]