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Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…are winning in state after state. In the past six years, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Washington, D.C., and doubled the number of students currently benefiting from private school choice to 400,000. All told, together, we’ve helped more than a million kids in private school choice programs, and we’re just getting started. “Just getting started”: we should n…

National Review’s Kevin Williamson Comes Out Against Daughters, Misunderstands Science

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…t out, but female offspring will probably go on to crank out a predictable number of their own offspring every year. In such a situation, mothers in good condition can afford to take the risk on male offspring, because they’re playing with the “house money” that nature has given them. Meanwhile, mothers in poor condition should favor female offspring, because in this scenario it’s daughters who are the “sure thing.” Notice the common theme of “mot…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…that happened over a twelve month period in my family’s life (as well as a number of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a…

None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)

By Elizabeth Drescher

…sticism. Religion News Service regrets the inaccuracy.” Well, okay. Take a number if you’d like to complain about my own writerly inaccuracies. Still, the trouble with the piece goes beyond an inaccurate (though indisputably grabby) headline. Reporter Kimberly Winston is careful to point out that the Pew report authors have noted “that [the religiously unaffiliated] are by no means homogeneous.” She goes on to highlight Pew researchers’ noting of…

Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…se members. In 2013, the SBC claimed 15,735,640 members, and in 2014, that number fell by 236,467 to 15,499,173—that’s a 1.5 percent decline. However, on this stat alone, the claim could be made that churches are simply clearing out the cobwebs and tidying up their membership rolls so their numbers more accurately reflect their active members. The problem is, membership isn’t alone in its decline—it’s joined by baptisms and weekly worship attendan…

Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection

By Jacob J. Erickson

…faithfulness no longer present even among the faithful. They ask about the complex emotional lives of orcas and the communication of dolphins. They gesture towards possible spiritualities and humanisms among chimps and apes, like primatologists Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, respectively. They ask about forest restoration and global warming and water scarcity. We could most certainly add elephants to this mix, but, in doing so, spiritual or ethic…

LGBT Editor In Bangladesh Murdered by Islamists—and More, In this Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…being posted to social media. The rise in intensity of anti-LGBT sentiment comes after the homophobic comments of actor Ahmed Landolsi on Tunisian television channel Al Hiwar Ettounsi… The pressure on Germany to change the designation of Tunisia and its neighbors comes just weeks after the largest ever deportation to a Maghrebi country, when German authorities sent home 24 Tunisian asylum seekers earlier this month. At the time, German press repor…

New Report: Muslim Terrorism a ‘Minuscule Threat’

By Hussein Rashid

…01%. If we take a more realistic number of 4 million American Muslims, the numbers become 0.005% over a decade, or 0.0005% per year. Last year there were 14,000 homicides in the U.S., and with a population of 300,000,000, that’s about 0.0005% of the population are murderers. The report ends with this sage advice: “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terrorism while maintaining a responsible sens…

The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

By Andrew Aghapour

…ve audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribute artificial intelligence across multiple hardware platforms, instead of clustering so much precious technology into a single body? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a dog-like Roomba, a wireless ho…

Wesolowski Sexual Abuse Case a New Approach or Same Old Same Old?

By Mary E. Hunt

…evil so deep and enduring that few people want to talk about it. The sheer number of victims and their willingness to come forward despite whatever stigma they might endure give this case special status. The colonialism alone is repulsive; the legal ramifications boggle the mind; and the religious implications for a very Catholic country are staggering. If this is how the new guidelines work with regard to sexual abuse victims, I say back to the d…