Given that Western liberalism is defined by a desire for social and political equality, the tendency among liberals to support minority groups is both natural and in fact laudable. In practice…
Yesterday, August 24, 2020, was the first day of classes at right-wing evangelical school Liberty University. It also turned out to be the final day of the scandal-prone Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s…
At a recent Jesuit-sponsored conference in Brazil focusing on the first five years of Pope Francis’ papacy, scholars waxed poetic about papal documents, quoting chapter and verse, claiming that this…
The practice of commenting on religion and politics frequently takes one to strange places. Say, for example, having to parse a statement like this defense of former Alabama Supreme Court Justice and…
What inspired you to write PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire? I was fascinated by how fast PTL grew and how quickly it fell apart. What I really wanted to know…
Over the holidays, the New York Times ran a punishing profile of Marc Gafni, an ex-rabbi who reinvented himself as a New Age spiritual leader. A founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom and organizer…
In another sign of just how far the agendas of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Pope Francis have diverged, it’s worth noting that at their recently concluded fall plenary, the bishops…
After meeting with Sexual abuse survivors, Pope Francis led off his remarks to the Bishops at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary with a commitment to change the climate surrounding sexual abuse in the…
It doesn’t take more than a glance at the recent Reuters report to see that the American Catholic church doesn’t just have a crisis in the rising number of former Catholics. Unsurprisingly, those same…