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How Timothy Kurek silences the LGBT community.

It’s easy. It’s so easy to skewer the American South, to depict its denizens and cultural products and religious values as a homogenized clutch of deprivation and backwardness. It’s so easy that The Learning Channel is riding high in the ratings game these days with Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the latest offering to confirm mainstream media’s deep investment in portraying a one-dimensional and abject South. The old weary stereotypes slide down smoothly, like the creamy underlayer of a hashbrown casserole. It takes too much work to refract the South through a variegated interpretive lens; and besides, would consumers buy into this multifaceted vision anyway? If ever there were a bullseye target for this kind of elitist and unhelpful framing, it would surely be Southern Gospel music.

At the end of September the Chamber of Deputies narrowly voted 50-49 to adopt a controversial bill that would decriminalize first-trimester abortions. If approved by the senate and signed by the president as expected, Uruguay will become the second Latin American country to legalize abortion. (Cuba was the first.) Undoubtedly, this would be a significant step forward for those advocating for reproductive rights and access in the country, but pro-choice activists are hesitant to hail it a true victory.

Media excitement continues over the latest Pew poll showing continued growth in the religiously affiliated. But do such data really tell us what we need to know about the Four F’s of Contemporary American Spirituality: Family, Fido, Friends, and Food?

While Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master provides the latest (and greatest) vantage point, 2011 saw the release of three solid films on the topic. Why now?

Restless Heart is quite obviously a labor of love. Someone really, really loves Augustine. Writing critically about it, which I must do, feels a bit like complaining that someone’s terribly earnest, harp-accompanied wedding was tacky, and too long.

The theology that gets you to a point where you can say this.

On September 13, when word came that my friend, the Rev. Howard Moody, had died at the age of 91, I remembered a self-description he loved to put out. He said that he came from a long line of “dirt…

The latest lawsuit against insurance coverage for contraception.

Instead of setting out to debunk Scientology, The Master is driven by Anderson’s genuine curiosity about religious charisma. The writer-director got the idea for the film after reading that postwar America was a particularly fertile environment for new religious movements. This idea brought together a number of other themes and ideas that had been rattling around in his head for some time, catalyzing them into a coherent story.