With the caveat that “interfaith programs are not a miracle solution,” he offers three ways that this work can help:

First, “interfaith helps harmonize people’s identities.” Patel goes on:

“In America, just about everyone is some sort of hyphenated hybrid of race, religion and ethnicity/nationality... Religious extremists try to separate people’s various identities and pit them against each other.”

Patel suggests that the Tsarnaev brothers might have been less vulnerable to extremism if they “had been involved in discussions with people from other backgrounds about how their faith identity was mutually enriching with their nationality and citizenship.”

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Terrence Malick’s typically beautiful new film, To the Wonder, does exactly that, yet its depiction of the divine love/human love parallel is so elliptical as to flirt with inscrutability.

To be sure, Malick’s screenplay does telegraph the main theme of the work explicitly, usually in voiceovers (there are a lot of voiceovers) by a doubt-ridden priest played by Javier Bardem. Bardem’s priest wonders why we fall in and out of love with God, as we watch a couple played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko fall in and out of love with each other. If the parallelism were not clear enough, Bardem’s priest—played with brilliant understatement by an actor who often goes for the jugular—tells us how human love can serve as a gateway to divine love. Which (metaphysical spoiler alert) is roughly the final resolution of the film.

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How did I miss that?

That Golden Era wasn’t in the 1980s when reporters treated evangelicals as bumblers and missed the significance of the conservatives’ takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. And it surely wasn’t during the late 1940s and 1950s when, according to Debra Mason, “the abundance of syndicated religion content says more about demand for such content than it does about the quality of religion beat reporting, given its lack of originality and its low level of journalistic skill.”

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by Scott Korb

Beacon Press, 2013

What inspired you to write Light Without Fire? 

In the wake of the Fort Hood mass shooting by Army Medical Corps officer Nadil Malik Hasan, Forbes published an essay under the headline “Going Muslim,” written by Tunku Varadarajan, who today often writes for The Daily Beast. At the time, Varadarajan was working at NYU, where I teach writing courses, often about religion. The coinage he explained this way:

“This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.”

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For Peter Rollins, Belfast native and leading writer and thinker in the Emergent Christian movement, “God” has fallen prey to our grasping, market-driven existence — just another shiny thing we acquire to make ourselves feel OK.

Alfred Hitchcock called this (in another context entirely) the “MacGuffin,” or as Rollins explains it: “that X for which some or all of the main characters are willing to sacrifice everything, something that people want in some excessive way — the object that seems to promise fulfillment, satisfaction and lasting pleasure.”

And yet when we get our hands on the longed-for MacGuffin, it doesn’t do away with our feelings of emptiness or brokenness, and may well deepen them. Instead, Rollins argues, there is no cure for our brokenness, other than the full and complete acceptance of it.

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The debate over the “Defense of Religion Act” in North Carolina played out with the predictability of a sitcom. I offer this modest proposal, then, to remind both sides that if this is a war, then they have fought to a stalemate, and it is time for some new tactics, by which I mean: the history of religion in America demonstrates that the winner of the culture war will be the side that does the opposite of everything they are doing now.

Consider the tussle in North Carolina. Last month, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Board of Commissioners in Rowan County, North Carolina who have a habit of opening every session with a Christian prayer. An official meeting from December 2007, for example, began:

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The church, a multicolored brick building with stained glass windows that look like rolling waves, is flanked on one side by a domed Greek Orthodox church, and on the other by a field stretching out to a subdivision. Just inside its doors in 2009, 67-year-old Dr. George Tiller, one of the few late-term abortion providers in the United States and an usher at his longtime church, was shot and killed by a man named Scott Roeder.

To abortion rights advocates, the murder was the tragic culmination of a decades-long campaign by abortion opponents who had stalked Dr. Tiller; barraged him with nuisance lawsuits; blockaded and bombed his clinic; shot him in both arms in a previous, failed assassination attempt; and helped inspire Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly to begin a nightly television harangue against the doctor he condemned as “Tiller the Killer.”

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In 1943, Allied forces achieved a hard-fought victory in the North African campaign, captured Sicily, and began to fight their way up the Italian peninsula. Victories in places such as El-Alamein, Salerno, and Anzio gave America some confidence that the Allies would ultimately prevail in Europe. That confidence allowed the American public to shift more of its attention to the Pacific Theater. Popular magazines such as National Geographic began to publish more maps and articles about the Pacific because Americans suddenly wanted to know a lot more about Saipan and Leyte Gulf.

The same sort of shift is happening now for the left in America’s long-running culture war. From the 1980s until the birth of the Tea Party, most of the action was in the Social Theater, in which the religious right and the secular left waged an existential struggle for the soul of American society. Issues related to sexuality, drugs, religion, family life, and patriotism were particularly vexing, and many people over 40 can recall the names of battlefields such as Mapplethorpe, needle exchange, 2 Live Crew, and the flag-burning amendment. But the left won a smashing victory in the 2012 elections, including the first victories at the ballot box for gay marriage. These triumphs, combined with polling data showing the tolerant attitudes of younger voters, give the left confidence that it will ultimately prevail on most issues in the Social Theater. The power base of the religious right is older, white, rural Protestants, a group that immigration, demography, and urban renewal have consigned to play an ever-shrinking role in American presidential elections.

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On the surface, the Windsor and Perry cases are about constitutional rights, and the limits of federal government (not to mention the procedural questions of standing, mind-numbing to non-lawyers but conceivably dispositive here). Does the combination of federalism and an equal protection violation justify overturning the Defense of Marriage Act? What is the relationship between the US Constitution, the California constitution, and a voter initiative that defines certain rights?

And yet, these questions are surely not the real issue.

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Heritage Foundation fellow Ryan T. Anderson’s defense of one-man-one-woman marriage in the Washington Post argues that Americans should affirm the “traditional” model of marriage for the good of the country. “Marriage is based on the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman,” he writes, “and on the social reality that children need a mother and a father.”

In other words, nature teaches that marriage is about complementarity between genitals, hormones, and gonads. To redefine marriage as something other than responsible parenthood would be to override nature’s law and give in to those selfish desires that undermine the common good.

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The role that American religious right leaders have played in fomenting anti-gay bigotry in Uganda has been well-documented, but never before with the emotional punch delivered by God Loves Uganda, a new documentary by Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

“I love Uganda,” says Kapya Koama in the film’s opening words. But, “something frightening is happening that has the potential to destroy Uganda.”

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Sources inside the LDS Church say that a woman will for the first time in the history of Mormonism offer an invocation or benediction at the Church’s worldwide General Conference, this April 6–7, veteran religion journalist Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

The announcement comes after Mormon feminists and their allies mounted a “Let Women Pray” letter-writing campaign this winter. (LDS officials say that the Conference program was set “many weeks ago.”)

Women’s advocates within the LDS Church like LDS WAVE have long pointed to the continuing restriction on women praying in the Church’s global meetings as one of many examples of day-to-day gender inequalities in the practice of Mormonism—most of them having absolutely no foundation in current Church teachings.

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It’s going to be very tempting to forget this fact over the next few days. The pundits, Catholic and otherwise, have been rapt in the suspense of awaiting the arrival of Pope Francis. We heard a lot of impossible hopes for who the next pope would be, along with the less thrilling reality of the actual candidates. But Catholics, along with the masses who have been suddenly and momentarily interested in Catholic affairs, should remember that the papacy is not to be confused with the church itself. At no time should this have been more clear than those strange and special few days when the Catholic Church was a people—an assembly, a community, a mystical body—without a pope.

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Well, we have a pope. After almost two weeks of speculation, prediction, even handicapping, the first non-European pope in over a thousand years, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, stepped out on the Vatican loggia at 8:22 Central European Time today to be introduced to the world.

In some respects, the election of Cardinal Bergoglio is a very promising sign. As an archbishop from the most populous Catholic continent on earth, Latin America, the new Pope Francis I symbolizes a shift that has been a very long time coming, from Euro-centrism to the church of the Global South. And his reputation as an advocate for the poor, emphasizing the Christian Gospel of love, washing the feet of AIDS victims, and more.

The new pope’s legacy will stand him in good stead as well, since his parents were Italians, and he speaks Italian fluently—not a bad thing for a pope—even as he has never served in the Vatican curia, the focus of much criticism and concern in recent months. He is also the first Jesuit pope in history. Being a member of the largest religious order in the church certainly can’t hurt.

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Sadly, I was even less surprised when the suit was amended in January to include Covenant Life Church (CLC), the congregation I had attended for nine years, and to add new charges of physical and sexual abuse by pastors, as well as allegations of abuse on church property. From what I’d seen inside Sovereign Grace and Covenant Life from 1996–2005, the alleged abuse seemed almost predictable—the result of the group’s toxic teachings on parenting, gender, and sexuality.

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Yes, it’s time for another generation to take its stab at filming the biblical epics. This time it comes in full ten-hour miniseries form and with rather apocalyptic hopes placed on its success.

The Bible debuted on The History Channel last night (right before The Vikings, another full-blown historical epic miniseries—the little bit I happened to see of it featured some torrid sex scenes). Reality TV producer Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice) credits his wife Roma Downey (formerly of Touched by an Angel, here playing Mary, mother of Jesus, in the film) with inspiring the idea for the film:

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Frank Bruni’s recent op-ed on clerical celibacy states in no uncertain terms that “celibacy is a bad idea with painful consequences.”

“The pledge of celibacy that the church requires of its servants is an often cruel and corrosive thing,” he writes. “It runs counter to human nature.” People need companionship, including bodily companionship, and it’s plainly unnatural to ask them to forego it for an entire lifetime. He also sees it as a sort of spiritual neon sign that attracts people who are uncomfortable with their sexuality, usually because it falls outside the one-man-one-woman pattern. “It’s a trap” for those who stray from cultural norms, whether gay men or pedophiles, “falsely promising some men a refuge from sexual desires that worry them.” Thus he concludes that celibacy is a large factor in the sexual abuse of children within the Church.

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A newly released digital edition of the four books of LDS or Mormon scripture—the Holy Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price—includes editorial changes that reflect a shifting official view on issues like polygamy, the Church’s history of racism, and the historicity of LDS scripture.

Perhaps the most significant is the inclusion of a new heading to precede the now-canonized 1978 announcement of the end of the LDS Church’s ban on black priesthood ordination:

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Just about everyone is piling on Facebook-COO Sheryl Sandberg, who aims to launch not only Lean In the book on March 11 but a slickly-designed national Lean In movement to propel more ambitious women up the ladder.

“I always thought I’d run a social movement,” Sandberg has said.

“People come to a social movement from the bottom up, not the top down,” replied Maureen Dowd on Sunday. “Sandberg has co-opted the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself.”

Details, details, details.

I for one am not complaining that the Sandberg hype is helping rebuild feminist buzz. I like hearing those syllables—feminism—sounded out proudly to the world, especially by people who are making off like bandits with its benefits.

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