Religion Dispatches
…time, there were less than 34,000 Muslims in all of Canada. By 2001, this number had grown to 579,600. While the population of Muslims grew tremendously in North America, we were almost absent from the array of characters portrayed on television. When I was a child, Hadji from reruns of the animated show Johnny Quest, was the only Muslim I could identify on television, with the added bonus that he was also a fellow East Indian. However, I was puz…
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…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
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…ke expressed expected horror—is that it’s based on scant data. That’s clue Number One that the topic is ripe for conversation and that people of varying views will use Pope Francis’ words to confirm their own positions. A look at the movie offers a context for how to interpret the text. Unless one knows better in advance, it would be easy to conclude from the film that there are just a handful of Catholic women in the world. Evgeny Afineevsky craf…
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…s as mostly atheists and agnostics when they clearly are not (although the numbers of atheists and agnostics are rising as well), the subtext that the nones haven’t fully thought through their choice to disaffiliate from religion is offensive—and it’s a prime example of how journalists talk over nones instead of to us. Bolling, by contrast, works directly with students, which gives him valuable insight into their mindset and decision making. “Some…
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…the many differences between various Jewish and Christian sects in how to number and interpret these different sets of commandments. All of this I explain in my book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. Seemingly small differences are magnified because Christianity has historically claimed to possess ultimate truth, so any deviation from an absolute truth is significant. Minor variations are further magnified by, as James…
Read More…t’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Philadelphia after Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter tried to extract a six-figure sum from the Churc…
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…them. That’s what severed the relationship. Academic Quality A surprising number of courses asked little more of students than to memorize Bible verses or learn basic details of biblical stories so that they could fill in the blanks on tests. Some made very questionable choices about the use of classroom time, such as the course that spent two days watching “the historic documentary Ancient Aliens,” which presents “a new interpretation of angelic…
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…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…
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…to date was HPA for the Win in June 2010, during which HPA mobilized huge numbers of online voters from across fandoms and online communities to win a $250,000 grant from the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Then there’s the current “Deathly Hallows” campaign, which centers on the release date of a Harry Potter movie—in this case, The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on Nov. 19. The Deathly Hallows campaign will run for nine months—the time bet…
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…g, then one can see their fruits in Germany today. Last month, following a number of horrid, hateful slogans chanted at Jews (in the context of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was a large public vigil in Berlin to protest anti-Semitism. Among the attendees were German President Joachim Guack, members of Germany’s parliament, leaders of both of the country’s major churches, an…
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