Spirituality
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A new academic study looks at the shame gendered by a religious system of enforced masculinity
In a tweet, social scientist Samuel L. Perry posed a thesis: Evangelical subculture fosters masculine insecurity, especially when it comes to a self-perception of penis size. “But how to study penis insecurity?” Perry wrote. If you tried to survey people, he thought, everyone would lie. “But NOBODY lies to Google.”
This month, Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, sociologists from University of Oklahoma and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis respectively, published a study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR) in which they found the preponderance of evangelicals in a given state consistently predicts greater numbers of Google searches…
The Christian influencer and Bible teacher has been a towering figure among evangelicals willing to criticize Trump
Beth Moore fills a commanding niche in women’s evangelical circles. She has nearly a million Twitter followers; she runs Living Proof Ministries, a Texas-based Bible organization for women; she has headlined sports-arena-sized conferences; and she hosts a television show.
Moore is a petite, blonde, Southern belle with an Arkadelphia, Arkansas, folksiness and a televangelist’s urgency. She’s charming, self-deprecating, and can with conviction call Satan a liar and Donald Trump an example of “gross entitlement & power.” …
Both the New Age and the far right are drawn to conspiracy theories
Last week’s rallies in London, Berlin, and Los Angeles against lockdown measures attracted both New Agers and far-right groups. We’ve seen before this overlap between the spiritual movement and the fast-spreading conspiracy theory, QAnon, which insists that an evil cabal of Hollywood celebs and liberal politicians (led by Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton) are child-eating Satanists who control the world. …
For one writer, the holy month is teaching him to speak to himself as much as to God
My father died when I was just seven months old. He left me a few things: his dictionary, his address book, his ruby-and-diamond-studded cufflinks, and his name. I was born Frank Andrew Evans III, and for a while, that’s the only name I knew. My mother didn’t tell me about my Muslim name — Khalid Ali—until I was around 10 or 11. My father must have bestowed it upon me with the hopes that, like him, I would study and practice Islam. But my mother had other ideas. She believes in ghosts, in magic, in the supreme forces of the…
Prison Stories
On losing a place of worship and losing a friend in prison
Renzi and I used to take care of the Buddha. He sits outside the prison chapel on a small patch of earth that was allotted to Buddhist prisoners by a warden, long since retired.
On this patch of earth, our Bodhi Tree is a maple. It has a stout trunk and gnarled roots that have grown out of the ground in many places. Hard to believe it blew into this prison during a windstorm as a seed, sprouted from a crack in the sidewalk, then was planted, by a Buddhist, where it now grows.
A pair of apple trees are…
Reasonable Doubt
Is God all in our heads—a product of brain chemistry? Or is the human brain like a radio that can tune into the divine?
The line between faith and science has always figured prominently in my life. Long before my decade as a religion correspondent for NPR, I was raised in Christian Science, the religion that privileges prayer over medicine. I reached adulthood without ever going to the doctor, getting a shot, or taking a vitamin, much less antibiotics. In my early thirties, I left the religion after a happy encounter with Tylenol: A single pill eviscerated my three-day fever within the space of 10 minutes. …
Girls were once raised to aspire to princess-hood — but in 2018, it’s all about making your own magic
Once upon a time, books and cartoons told little girls that princesses lived a perfect life. A princess was pretty, wealthy, talented, and would fall in love with and marry a brave prince who would rescue her from an evil stepmother or a fierce dragon. She would live happily ever after in his castle, busy having babies while her prince would rule the kingdom and protect her. Any girl would wish for this life, right?
Well, no, because what a woman really wants to be is a witch.
The figure of the witch used to be portrayed as a hag…
