Hear Kathryn Joyce, The Revealer’s former managing editor, talk about personhood bills, the Quiverfull movement, and the patriarchy movement here, on Tulsa public radio.

Nicole Neroulias writes at The Scoop that despite common reporting, same sex marriage is about a lot more than religion.

Yesterday the USCCB spelled out exactly why they are opposed to the Obama administration’s provision of birth control to all insured women without a copay.  The Church would strongly prefer to tell employers and employees, at least the ones that answer to Catholic leadership, how to manage their reproductive rights.  If the issue were just money (no Catholic money used to “subsidize” contraceptives), the compromise that Obama and Sebelius struck with insurance companies–that companies will provide contraception to individuals directly, without implicating the employer–would satisfy the USCCB.  It doesn’t.  Which reminds me, will Kathleen Sebelius still give the graduation speech at Georgetown University?

The Economist follows up on a May 6th New York Times feature about “The Life of Jesus Christ,” a play performed by the inmates of Angola prison in Louisiana, with an article of its own.  The New York Times used the title, “In Prison, Play With Trial at Its Heart Resonates,” The Economist, “Enacting forgiveness and redemption.”  Both remind me of the brilliant piece by Liliana Segura at Colorlines last year, “Dispatch From Angola: Faith-Based Slavery in a Louisiana Prison.”

Don’t miss in media res‘ fantastic series of events, “Religious Representations on Television,” from today through Friday.  See here for details.

Kathryn Joyce, The Revealer‘s first managing editor, interviews David Clohessy, national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) on the Catholic Church’s new tactic for silencing the group in court.

Rick Santorum pals around with a preacher who thinks non-Christians should get out of the U.S.

Scott Korb, our former books editor, writes at The Chronicle of Higher Education about the first Muslim liberal-arts institution in the U.S., Zaytuna College:

Not a Muslim myself, nor a believer in any appreciable way, I’ve spent much of the last 18 months with these scholars and their students: at a venerable mosque in Brooklyn and a storefront mosque in Oakland; at fund raisers in Washington, D.C.; New Brunswick, N.J.; New York City, and throughout the Bay Area; in online forums and open houses; in classrooms and in the basement of a Roman Catholic church; and in Muslim community centers located in low-rent business parks. When I asked Sheik Hamza recently whether he was surprised to see his name in the [NYPD surveillance] report, he said no. Although he added, “A lot of these young Muslims born here are not always aware of the history of real persecution of other communities. They would do well reading more history.”

Church and the Russian University. Fundamentalism as a result of secularization, not an expression of tradition. “Shifting Politics in the World’s Newest Nation.” “How Ethiopia’s Adoption Industry Dupes Families and Bullies Activists.” Thanks to a lingering hatred for Communism… The most significant Chinese political event of 2011. Getting arms around the cult of Kim Jong Il.

It’s been a great week for readers, thanks to a suite of articles by members of The Revealer‘s family of writers.  Covering issues from reality-based food to women’s travel, from the health care crisis to Zionist activism to religious compounds in Missouri, we’re proud to have such talented and diverse writers’ names to drop!

Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce has an important article, “Escape from Missouri,” in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.  Read more about it here.  Buy it on newsstands today.

Our books editor Scott Korb has a new piece in the special food issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “It’s What’s for Dinner.”  You can read the article here.  Read Nathan Schneider’s comments on the article here.

Former managing editor Meera Subramanian has contributed to a new book, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011.  Get your copy here.

Kiera Feldman–and we admit it’s a stretch to claim her as one of our own, but we will–has an article at The Nation this week, “The Romance of Birthright Israel.”  Read it here; read Jeff Sharlet’s comments on it here.

Your editor truly has a piece at The Nation this week on the Catholic Church’s renewed focus on aid in dying and the implications for health care in the US.  Read it here.

Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce has a new article in the May 9 print edition of The Nation. You can read it online here.  You can listen to Nation editor Betsy Reed and Kathryn talk about the evangelical adoption movement here.  An excerpt from the article:

As a way for conservative evangelicals to reclaim the social gospel message from liberal churches, adoption is a perfect storm, too, seemingly defining antiabortion activism as more truly “prolife”—or “whole life,” as one Bethany staffer coined it—while providing a new opportunity, as recent orphan theology texts explain, to spread the gospel. In Reclaiming Adoption, Cruver bluntly declares, “The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.”

What was once a rallying cry by U.S. evangelical organizations to limit access to birth control here and abroad (see former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce’s 2008 article at The Nation, “Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies”) is now a Vatican topic for discussion at a UN panel.

Of the seven recipients of the 2011 Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion, two have spent time at The Revealer!  Kathryn Joyce, the founding managing editor, and Nicole Greenfield, have both graced our pages and shaped who we are and what we do.  Here’s what the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the administrator of the award, has to say about their winning projects:

• Kathryn Joyce will investigate the burgeoning U.S. evangelical adoption movement and “orphan theology,” reporting on international adoption in Rwanda and Liberia. Joyce, who has published in Mother Jones, Salon and Newsweek, is a three-time recipient of reporting support from the Nation Institute Fund for Investigative Journalism. She is also the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (2009).
• Reporting from Argentina, which became the first Latin American nation to legalize same-sex marriage in July 2010,Nicole Greenfield will examine the complex relationship among religion, politics and LGBT rights in the diverse city of Buenos Aires. Greenfield is a freelance journalist based in New York City.

From Kathryn Joyce’s recent article at Religion Dispatches:

Adult victims could comprise up to 25% of all clergy abuse cases, estimates David Clohessy, National Director of SNAP, but often face considerable skepticism about their stories. “In the eyes of the law, victims like Birge are adults. But that doesn’t mean that emotionally, psychologically, in the presence of a trusted, powerful, charismatic clergy person, that in fact they can function like adults.” Considering the abundant ethical and legal prohibitions against doctors or therapists having even consensual sex with patients, in recognition of coercive power imbalances in play, Clohessy notes, “none of us have been raised from birth to think that a therapist is God’s representative or that a doctor can get me into heaven.”

“Glenn Beck’s efforts to transform himself from Fox News demagogue into a religious leader for Tea Party America has a lot of commentators discussing the feasibility of a Mormon convert leading a wary evangelical and Catholic right in a faith-driven cause. While there are significant roadblocks hindering Beck’s quest for leadership in the Christian Right, he wouldn’t be the first Mormon to advocate a right-wing alliance that stretches across faiths. Beck follows hundreds of Mormon “pro-family” activists who have united with conservative Catholics and evangelicals to form a common front in the culture wars.”

Continue reading at Religion Dispatches.

In a recent article for AlterNet Bill Berkowitz describes the fear of European population decline — so-called “birth dearth” or, as used to evoke the horrors of nuclear winter, “demographic winter” — “as a catchphrase for turning the discussion [about declining birth rates and rising population age in the West] into another battle in the culture war. For many on the Right, demographic winter describes a future of economic catastrophes, the decline of Western Civilization, and the destruction of the “natural” family.”