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Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…

The Episcopal Church ‘Takes a Flying Leap’ into Controversies Old and New

By Elizabeth Drescher

…gical rites for the blessing of same-gender relationships (A049). No small number of commentators in both the blogosphere and conventional news organizations (however more thoughtful,and factual, they might have been than Akasie in presenting their opinions) were quick to link the passage of these resolutions to the continuing numerical decline of the Episcopal Church and Mainline Protestantism more generally. Specifying Transgender Inclusion In t…

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

By Alana Massey

…ave only carried so many bullets with him. Americans knew how to watch the number of reported casualties go up, but we lost our collective minds when we watched the number of confirmed active shooters in Paris go up. The images coming out of Paris in the immediate term were of a city devoured by chaos and fear rather than the stillness of carnage, more terrifying for their uncertainty. There was a brief lull in the digital noise when an official g…

Will Pope’s African Tour Change Attitudes on Divorce and LGBTQ Among African Catholics?

By Kaya Oakes

…a has gone through a startling increase in recent decades. Since 1980, the number of African Catholics has grown by 238%, in contrast to Europe, where it has grown by only 6%. Some of this may be attributable to higher fertility rates in African countries, but it also reflects the church’s success in missionary efforts. And where there are a decreasing number of vocations to the priesthood in Europe, where vocations have declined by 23%, African v…

ABC’s Hit Sitcom Black-ish Does God, Pushes Theological Respectability

By Anthony B. Pinn

…ical practices tied to a rejection of God also informs the labor and civil rights work of non-believers such as A. Philip Randolph. And, who can forget W. E. B. DuBois, whose frame (“the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line”) continues to inform what we think about race? What we often forget is that he was an agnostic. James Weldon Johnson, who provided the anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was a nonbeliever who rej…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…llion atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for more than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being…

Bill Gates’ Comments on Covid-19 Vaccine Enflame ‘Mark of the Beast’ Worries in Some Christian Circles

By Christopher James Blythe

…t buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name… his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” (Revelation 13:16-18) In the early twentieth century, this prophecy became linked to American fears of a powerful federal government. A 1943 letter to the editor of the Pampa Daily News was representative of this growing resentment coupling conspiracy with apocalypticism: We should count it dishonorable for…

What Color is Vatican Smoke?

By Marian Ronan

…can and the bishops is inspired, in part at least, by the example of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. But putting one African American woman priest into a film does not justify a group of almost exclusively white, highly educated women, employing the analogy used here to make their point. (And if you have any doubts about this, take a look at the slide show on the Roman Catholic WomenPriests webpage and count the black faces—then c…

Park51 and the Ground Liberals Are Forced to
Fight On

By Sarah Posner

…e. “Contemporary liberalism,” he writes, “thinks far too often in terms of rights and speaks of those rights in a way that alienates a lot of regular people.” At the same time, though, he acknowledges how liberals have been forced to react to the right’s demagoguery (see, for example, the Guardian’s Andrew Brown’s post about the Pamela Geller-Robert Spencer duo, or Justin Elliott’s breakdown of same), a conundrum from which he depressingly sees no…

The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut

By Douglas Harrison

…, and then I say, thinking of all the ruined gay lives, this really is the number that no man can number. It’s also interesting to me that “Writing It Out” is followed by the section “War on the Children.” Such an organization suggests that the latter was a reaction against the former—that as these voices emerge, there’s this really virulent reaction culturally against them. And also it’s so very political. As the church has become more right-win…