What a difference a decade makes. In 2001 a clear majority of Americans opposed same-sex marriage. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) reserved federal recognition of marriage to one man, one woman, and there was barely a major religious group that supported anything other. Buddhists were the outliers. In 2003 the election of a gay ...

Jun 8, 2017 “We won’t walk by on the other side.” Those were the words of British Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in an allusion to the Parable of the Good Samaritan as he campaigned this week against the Conservatives on their Welfare policies. While nods to the Bible or Christianity are nowhere near as prominent as ...

Here is the story that is told about religion and racial justice today: The US civil rights movement was led by black male ministers harnessing the socially transformative power of the Christian tradition. The movement for black lives today is led by black youths, particularly female, particularly queer, who are largely detached from Christianity. This ...

Why are so many American Christians seemingly unbothered by the gutting of the institutions and policies dedicated to protecting our environment? Does the blame lie in Christianity itself? There have been those who thought so. Indeed, in the 1960s a certain line of cultural criticism began to hold western Christianity culpable for industrial society’s chronic ecological ...

Mar 31, 2017 In his essay for The Baffler, George Scialabba does a fine job summarizing Ivan Illich’s most famous period of writing, from 1971 to 1982. He foregrounds the Roman Catholic priest and philosopher’s peculiarity as a leftist intellectual who was resolutely opposed to most “progressive” political solutions, on the grounds that they amounted simply ...

March 24, 2017 When your democratic republic and unchecked global, political, and ecological trends feel as though they’re hurtling in chaos toward the sun, it’s nice to receive good news. A recent study by the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public life puts that good news right up in the title, “Americans Express Increasingly Warm Feelings ...