Twenty years ago, I worked as a Dallas-based religion reporter for The Associated Press. Many of the stories that dominated the headlines then remain relevant today.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) The team's star placekicker stressed that âbeing Catholic alone doesn't cut itâ while attacking many famous Catholics, including President Joe Biden, for, among other choices, making the sign of the cross during a Florida abortion rights rally. Butker spent most of his address criticizing many American bishops while also offering blunt defenses of Catholic teachings on sexuality.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) The Association of Religion Data Archives posted an absolutely fascinating dataset called âClergymen in Revolutionary America (1763-1783).â Itâs exactly what you think it is â a big spreadsheet of clergy in the colonies. Thatâs awesome. The data comes as a result of the efforts by Lewis Frederick Weis in the 1930s to collect this information.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) On May 20, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan filed applications for warrants of arrest before Pre-Trial Chamber I of ICC in the âSituation in the State of Palestine.â This follows the March 2021 opening of the investigation into the situation in the state of Palestine and a statement from Oct. 10, 2023, to confirm that the recent escalation of the situation is within the mandate of the ICC.
Read More
A recent series of crosscurrents and eruptions remind us that Catholic voters may well decide this odd contest between unwelcome nominees. As with Americans in general, Pew Research Center polling shows they give fellow Catholic Biden an unfavorable rating of 64 percent and 57 percent unfavorable toward Trump.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) In my work as a religious history scholar, Iâve learned that throughout history artists created images of Christ that would speak to different communities. In 1915, Norwegian artist Emanuel Vigeland created an image of Christ with golden hair and fair skin despite a popular illustration showing Christ as Middle Eastern with dark hair.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) The church was once considered a resource for understanding how reality works. Thatâs less the case today. To return to being a resource for things like artificial intelligence, weâd have to learn what the Bible says about technology and sorcery.
Read More
This would be a shock to the countercultural Catholic matriarchs who birthed this influential network.
Read More
Jelly Roll is on a roll. The âSon of a Sinnerâ artist â whose songs feature raw, religious lyrics that wrestle with his troubled past â won another big award on Thursday night.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) The power of todayâs digital media is much more complex than that, said Barbara Nicolosi Harrington, a former Catholic nun-turned-screenwriter and Hollywood script doctor. âHollywood has been the church of the masses, but I don't think thatâs still true. At least, we cannot say that movie theaters are the sanctuaries they once were for most people, especially for the young,â she Harrington.
Read More
Sometimes, an important high-level finding warrants some additional reflection. I have several of these rolling around in my head at any given point. The one I wanted to zero in on is from a post that ran over a year ago. Simply put, Catholic Mass attendance is way down. About half of all self-identified Catholics said that they attended Mass nearly every week in 1972. In the most recent data, itâs about half that rate.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) As the UPR was looking into the situation in Afghanistan, atrocity crimes continued. On the same day as the U.N. review, a gunman stormed a mosque in Andisheh town of Guzara district in Herat province, western Afghanistan. Six people were killed in the attack. The mosque is said to have belonged to Afghanistanâs minority Shiite community.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) The field of religion and politics presents me with a whole bunch of combinations of folks who would clearly fall into this cross pressured category. I wanted to focus on one today that may be the most incongruent â people who identify as atheist or agnostic on the religion question but then say that they are Republicans.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) The number of individuals in the U.S. who do not identify as being part of any religion has grown and âthe nonesâ are now larger than any single religious group. According to the General Social Survey, religiously unaffiliated people represented only about 5% of the U.S. population in the 1970s. This percentage began to increase in the 1990s and is now around 30%.
Read More
The feature is framed with bad news â that progressive Catholics in the United States are experiencing pain because of the rising numbers of young priests and young adults (especially parents with, wink-wink, lots of children) seeking a more pro-Catholic Catechism approach to faith.
Read More
A new, 400-page biography of 10-time All-Star pitcher Clayton Kershaw delves into his baseball success, his family life and, yes, his faith.
Read More
(ANALYSIS) While drama with the United Methodist Church continues to develop, the sexuality spotlight shifts to Americaâs Presbyterian Church (U.S.A)., which has already approved gay clergy and marriage but is heading into a different sexuality fuss that carries some risk of another church split.
Read More
Fears of AI are not the only things driving public concern about the end of the world. Climate change and pandemic diseases are also well-known threats. Reporting on these challenges and dubbing them a potential âapocalypseâ has become common in the media â so common, in fact, that it might go unnoticed, or may simply be written off as hyperbole.
Read More
Neighborly Faith studied academic publications addressing this issue and created a detailed, 14-point compromise definition stating, in part: âChristian Nationalism is a movement advancing a vision of America's past, present, and future that excludes people of non-Christian religions and non-Western cultures. Christian Nationalists romanticize Christianity's influence on America's development, attributing the nation's historical provenance to God's special favor.â
Read More
No doubt about it. Quite a few students up north are taking their talents, and tuition dollars, to Southern states. For a conservative take on the statistics, see this Daily Mail piece: âWhy college kids are abandoning Ivy Leagues to go to Southern schools.â
Read More