The Problem With Coverage That Treats Religious Violence as Incomprehensible
Why “Incomprehensible” Is an Audit Failure, Not an Explanation When a religious body’s political violence is reported as an eruption of the inexplicable, the coverage has already stopped doing the work that matters. The framing treats the event as a rupture in an otherwise legible institutional order. It is not. In constitutional democracies, religious violence […]
How Religious Institutions Respond to Financial Scandal and Public Trust: An Audit of Five Playbooks
When the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment manager $5 million in February 2023, the church issued a two-paragraph statement, paid, and carried on. No outside auditor arrived afterward. None could. The penalty covered a filing failure — thirteen shell companies had kept a portfolio […]
How Religious Institutions Respond to Financial Scandal and Public Trust
How Religious Institutions Respond to Financial Scandal and Public Trust When money goes missing inside a religious body, the response is rarely improvised. It was designed years earlier, in the legal instruments that fund and shield the institution: the church-tax statute that delivers state-collected revenue, the concordat that governs its banking, the endowment act that […]
How the SBC Executive Committee, the Diocese of Buffalo, and the Vatican Secretariat of State Each Built a Narrative Infrastructure — and What Investigators Need to Match It
On May 22, 2022, Guidepost Solutions delivered a 288-page report to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee documenting that, for two decades, Executive Committee staff had maintained an internal list of accused ministers while publicly insisting no such centralized tracking existed. Six months earlier, on November 12, 2020, the Diocese of Buffalo filed for Chapter […]
Why Religious Liberty Debates Are Really About Who Has Institutional Power
… …” } I’ll now compose the final answer. Only JSON, no markdown fences (the instruction says return strict JSON only â I’ll output raw JSON; adding a code fence might break “strict JSON only” parsing. Safer to output raw JSON without fences.){ “title”: “Why Religious Liberty Debates Are Really About Who Has Institutional Power”, […]