Category: Cover Story

Author’s Note: This essay is dedicated to the loving memory of the ever-wise Tom Flynn, who graciously printed so many of my articles over the years on this topic because he shared my deep concern. What more can be said about the oppression of overpopulation that I and my colleagues have not pontificated on for …

In recent years, environmentalism has received growing support from the leaders of major world religions. Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has been a vocal advocate of climate action, even suggesting that caring for the environment should rank alongside feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless as an act of Christian mercy. In 2015, …

If a peaceful demonstration ends in smashing, looting, and burning, hard questions arise. Do these actions amount to justifiable violence? Excusable violence? Do they amount to violence at all? A study by Crowd Counting at the University of Connecticut estimated that in the spring and summer of 2020, 98 percent of Black Lives Matter demonstrations …

A miracle is usually defined as an event supposedly unexplainable by nature. But such a definition is predicated on a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance—that is, from a lack of knowledge. It is like saying, “We don’t know; therefore, we do know.” Anglican writer C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) succinctly defined a miracle as “an …

How well situated is humanism to face the challenges of the twenty-first century? In particular, what solutions can humanism contribute to the global ecological crisis from which the climate emergency is emerging as the defining crisis of our times? The omens don’t look good, because for a long time, humanism has associated itself with a …

While many of us fret about unaffordable housing or traffic jams caused in part by population pressures, a trending chorus of depopulation doomsaying laments that there are too few people—or will be shortly. Underneath this lament lies something that is factually true. Birthrates are dropping, and people are living longer.1 Human population ballooned in the twentieth …

There were many times when Gail1 thought she’d hit rock-bottom, only to fall even further and land with an even harder thud. Her childhood was rough. Her mother was encumbered with undiagnosed and untreated depression, and her father was bipolar—also undiagnosed and untreated. Part of his mania manifested in his packing up the family to move …

In her new book Wayward—A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare and Sexual Purity, noted actress Alice Greczyn (The Lying Game) describes a harrowing past rooted in some of the most popular and destructive fads to sweep Christian Right communities in recent decades. Among them are a focus on the “purity” of young women so extreme that …

Although I have fished in many places, I have always avoided the murky waters of biblical interpretation. Nevertheless, after reading yet another rendition of John 21—the verse about Peter’s boat fishing all night without success and Jesus’s “miraculously” filling its nets with 153 fish—I feel compelled to raise some issues. First, let’s talk fishing facts, …