News Article

By Mark Joseph Stern A federal appeals court blocked bans on LGBTQ “conversion therapy” for minors on Friday, finding that two Florida cities violate the First Amendment with laws that seek to protect children from the harmful and discredited practice. Both judges in the majority are Federalist Society members appointed by President Donald Trump. Their …

By Juhem Navarro-Rivera This year as turnout increased among all groups, and despite losing the popular vote again, Donald Trump gained over 10 million votes. Media narratives have placed a lot of attention on the Latinx vote since the president seems to have gained substantial support among this cohort. While two-thirds of Latinxs voted for …

By Maggie Koerth We all thought we knew what kinds of places to avoid: the ballparks, the Sunday services, the packed train cars. If we didn’t want to catch COVID-19, we should stay away from crowds. That was the mantra. So we skipped the summer street parties and we did virtual church. We had a …

by Ryan P. Burge, Eastern Illinois University It’s been just over two weeks from election day, and the hot takes about what groups were the most important for Joe Biden’s victory have already filled up social media. I did a number of media appearances in the days after election day where I pointed to the …

By Michelle Boorstein One week after a bombshell Vatican report about the rise of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, U.S. bishops debated the report’s import Monday at their biannual meeting, with some saying it left out the role of money, others saying it shows the bishop-picking process needs fixing, and still others disagreeing about whether it showed …

By John Stoehr On Monday, the Times ran an article as significant as it was generally overlooked. It was a short interview with Matthew Sheffield, a key architect of the right-wing media apparatus that not only spreads “alternative facts” but maintains an “alternative reality” that millions of Americans inhabit. “I basically built the infrastructure for a lot of …

By Nancy LeTourneau Paul Ewell, a business professor and dean at Virginia Wesleyan University, wrote on Facebook recently that anyone who supported Biden for president is “ignorant, anti-American and anti-Christian.” Donald Trump was so impressed with the sentiment that he retweeted the quote with a one word commentary: “Progress!” We have, of course, become somewhat immune to that kind …

By Sarah Zhang For all that scientists have done to tame the biological world, there are still things that lie outside the realm of human knowledge. The coronavirus was one such alarming reminder, when it emerged with murky origins in late 2019 and found naive, unwitting hosts in the human body. Even as science began to …

By Lucas Joel Paleontologists call it the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, but it has another name: “the Great Dying.” It happened about 252 million years ago, and, over the course of just tens of thousands of years, 96 percent of all life in the oceans and, perhaps, roughly 70 percent of all land life vanished forever. …

By Hemant Mehta On Monday, conservative Rod Dreher wrote about why Millennials were abandoning evangelical Christianity. Someone whose kids walked away from the faith, Dreher said, blamed Donald Trump and the MAGA-ness of so many churches, but Dreher didn’t believe that was the full extent of it. He posted a letter from a different reader that offered even more suggestions: …

By Devin Dwyer Houses of worship from Nevada to New York, chafing at attendance restrictions imposed by state governors during the coronavirus pandemic, are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene on their behalf as a matter of religious freedom. Two Orthodox Jewish synagogues in New York this week joined the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn in asking the justices to …

By JTA and Gabe Friedman Madison Cawthorn, the newly elected congressman from North Carolina who was criticized for selfies he took at Hitler’s vacation retreat in Germany, is a zealous Christian. And the 25-year-old firebrand conservative and part-time preacher is trying to convert Jews and Muslims. In an interview with Jewish Insider published Monday, Cawthorn, a rising …