Russell Moore writes: They were right. I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) a crisis. Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse. Someone asked me a few weeks ago what I expected from the third-party investigation into the handling of sexual abuse by the Southern Baptist… Read More »
The New York Times reports: As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolded, Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, had an awkward Zoom meeting with Pope Francis. The two religious leaders had previously worked together to bridge a 1,000-year-old schism between the Christian churches of the East and West. But the meeting,… Read More »
Rashad Ali and Anna Lekas Miller write: As soon as the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, familiar — and troubling — Islamophobic tropes began to emerge in the discourse. “America’s Taliban really hates women and minorities,” wrote Daily Beast editor Naveed Jamali on Twitter, harkening… Read More »
Margaret Atwood writes: In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around… Read More »
Nicholas Cannariato writes: The nature of time. Black holes. Ancient philosophers. The struggle for democracy. Climate change. Buddhist philosophy. In his new collection of essays and articles, Carlo Rovelli, one of the world’s most renowned physicists, broadens his writing to include questions of politics, justice and how we live now. “I look at myself as… Read More »
CNN reports: Pope Francis warned the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, not to become “Putin’s altar boy,” he said in an interview this week. In his strongest words to date against the pro-war Patriarch, Francis also slammed Kirill for endorsing Russia’s stated reasons for invading Ukraine. “I spoke to him for 40… Read More »
Mark Vernon writes: A change has come over the public discussion of religion in recent years. In the decade of the New Atheists, religion was the root of all evil. Nowadays, however, it tends to be thought of as a good, even necessary, part of society. In his recent book Dominion: The Making of the… Read More »
Politico reports: Like a lot of insiders associated with Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev has faced calls for international ostracism in the weeks since the invasion of Ukraine. It’s no surprise why: He’s used his powerful Moscow perch to endorse the Kremlin’s attack on its neighbor, cheering on the troops and casting their mission as… Read More »
Vladimir Putin lights a candle as he attends an Orthodox Church service in 2011. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, pool By Melani McAlister, George Washington University In February 2022, evangelical leader Franklin Graham called on his followers to pray for Vladimir Putin. His tweet acknowledged that it might seem a “strange request” given that Russia was clearly… Read More »
David French writes: On Thursday night in Castle Rock, Colorado, a group called “FEC United” (FEC stands for faith, education, and commerce) held a “town hall” meeting that featured a potpourri of GOP candidates and election conspiracy theorists. Most notably, the event included John Eastman, the Claremont scholar who authored the notorious legal memos that… Read More »
Religion News Service reports: A team of scholars, faith leaders and advocates unveiled an exhaustive new report Wednesday (Feb. 9) that documents in painstaking detail the role Christian nationalism played in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and calling it an unsettling preview of things to come. Christian nationalism was used to “bolster,… Read More »
The New York Times reports: On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi bureaucracy met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. Nibbles were served and washed down with cognac. There was only one point on the agenda: “The organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution… Read More »
Law enforcement officials outside Congregation Beth Israel synagogue on Jan. 15, 2022, in Colleyville, Texas. AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez By Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University The man who took a rabbi and three congregants hostage in Colleyville, Texas, on Jan. 15, 2022, believed that Jews control the United States of America. He told his hostages, as… Read More »
Yair Rosenberg writes: Most people do not realize that Jews make up just 2 percent of the U.S. population and 0.2 percent of the world’s population. This means simply finding them takes a lot of effort. But every year in Western countries, including America, Jews are the No. 1 target of anti-religious hate crimes. Anti-Semites… Read More »
Adam Shapiro writes: It’s been nearly 30 years—a generation!—since professional science communication as a field began to seriously push back against what’s been called the knowledge deficit model (sometimes just called the “deficit model.”) (See “The Trust Fallacy,” July–August 2021.) That model describes a way of thinking about people’s understanding and acceptance of scientific knowledge,… Read More »