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Robert Bellah’s Powerful Legacy: A Mixed Blessing for Religious Studies?

By Ivan Strenski

…e made a point of situating his notion of civil religion in a specifically American context. Bellah’s American civil religion appealed explicitly to Biblical archetypes like “God,” “Election,” “Providence” and such. They fit comfortably into the vocabulary and practices of American civil religion because of the very different historical conditions of the American founding. A notion like sacrificial death, for instance, found ready appeal at a time…

Ugandan Anti-Gay Fallout: New Laws, New Violence, New Underground Railroad

By Peter Montgomery

…ry to slow the momentum. All Africa has reported that Museveni will back a new version: “According to MPs backing a new version of the bill, the law will be watered down and focused on the threat of supposed homosexual recruitment of children.” Medard Bitekyerezo, an MP supporting the law, said it would not “harass” consenting adults. A Catholic Bishop said people frustrated by the Constitutional Court’s action “should not take the laws into their…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…930s, for example, most of these fundamentalists were very critical of the New Deal. For Americans who were actively looking for signs of the coming Antichrist in the context of the 1930s, in the context of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, Roosevelt had all the markings of someone setting the stage for the end times. He was concolidating power. Government was growing. I found a letter from one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s operatives. He had gone out to…

The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…mological configuration” that “eventually prevailed in the modern period.” New Math, New Science, New Protestants The point is that the really seismic changes at the Vatican all came in the 15th and 16th centuries, the age that just so happened to encompass the Protestant rebellion and the emergence of modern science at once. But by the 17th century, mathematics—and specifically mathematical physics—achieved a dominance that overturned the main in…

Secularism in the US is Larger, More Diverse and More Dynamic Than Ever, But You Wouldn’t Know it From the Media

By Chrissy Stroop

…e “big three” advocacy organizations—the Freedom from Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State—and commented on the increasing diversification of the secular movement, as a result of which “the movement has seen a more intersectional approach.” To be sure, movement atheism has long been dominated by cisgender white men, and much work remains to be done both in terms of diversifying leaders…

‘New Evangelical’-Progressive Alliance? Not So Fast

By Sarah Posner

…, and perhaps more of a rumble than a quake. And while the durability of a new movement is always difficult to assess when it’s young, it is nonetheless already clear that the politics of the “new” evangelicals are more complicated than its evangelists often portray. Pally’s essay is an update of her 2011 book and essay on the same subject, both of which appeared during the 2012 presidential campaign. In this latest essay she takes stock of evange…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…Jesus isn’t messiah material for religious Jews. So, at first glance, that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quick…

Black and white image of Betty and Barney Hill side by side with hands clasped.

From Civil Rights Liberals to New Age Conspiracy Theorists — What Betty and Barney Hill’s Alien Abduction Story Reveals About America

By Susannah Crockford

…, does not believe that the Hills knew what they saw. In doing so he reproduces the dynamic of the skeptical expert who, he argues, led the Hills to become spiritual seekers in the first place. In the culture of new age spirituality they found a new place to feel at home after their rejection by the establishment. Yet even in this careful retelling, they remain outside the boundary of legitimate knowledge….

Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…versy over US policy of not interfering with child sex abuse by allies The New York Times reported last weekend that American military personnel and civilians serving in Afghanistan have been required to look the other way as prominent Afghan allies participated in the rape of young boys, part of a broader practice of looking the other way regarding corruption and misdeeds in order not to undercut the fight against the Taliban. Pervasive sexual ab…