Religion Unplugged

The war between Israel and Hamas may be taking place 5,600 miles away from the United States, but the streets of some of America’s largest cities — and on college campuses in particular — have been highlighted over the past month by incidents of antisemitism.

Mark Driscoll recreates his now defunct Seattle Mars Hill Church into the Trinity Church in the Arizona desert. And he hasn't changed his abusive style.

In a move that would signal a seismic shift for the Catholic church, Pope Francis said he’s open to blessing same-sex unions and to studying the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood.

For a lot of reasons, communicating well is harder than it looks. One of the reasons is that people on the other end of the equation sometimes don’t listen any better than I talk. Often I’ve asked myself whether any of us actually hears anything accurately.

Author Kaitlyn Schiess wrote “The Ballot and The Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go From Here” to address how the Bible has been employed in the United States’ political discourse. Schiess addresses what she sees as proper uses and misuses of the Bible when we talk about politics.

“The Hiding Place” tells the true story of Corrie ten Boom, who with her sister, Betsie, and her father helped over 800 Jews escape capture in Nazi Germany by hiding them in their home before being arrested by the Nazis themselves and put into a consecration camp.

As I watched the hit docu-series "Shiny, Happy, People," I realized I needed to address a different set of questions: How did I — a child raised into that organization — break free? How can anyone break free of misguided, fundamentalist religious movements or cult-like organizations and, yet, still retain any kind of religious belief?