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Religious Leaders On Anti-Muslim Frenzy: “Silence Is Not An Option”

By Sarah Posner

…including Cizik, chided unnamed purveyors of anti-Muslim fervor as antagonists of the First Amendment. Richard Killmer of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture called it “a blight on America’s spirit and soul.” Several, including Cizik and Dr. Roy Medley, General Secretary of the American Baptist Churches, noted how their own traditions thrived from the religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, a freedom they said people in their…

Catholic ‘Soul-Searching’ as Ireland Votes on Marriage; Churches, American Activists Join Kenyan Anti-Gay Group’s ‘Family’ Confab; Indian Mom Seeks Spouse For Gay Son; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…advancement of LGBT rights a foreign policy priority, and Human Rights First hosted an event featuring several members of Congress and released a new report on advancing LGBT equality in Jamaica. As we have reported, American religious conservatives have stoked homophobia in Jamaica and rallied resistance to efforts to decriminalize homosexuality. The Human Rights First report takes note of the damaging role played by American evangelical activis…

Raelians’ “Clitoraid” Met With Suspicion in Burkina Faso

By Joseph Laycock

…ew hostile toward Raelianism and Clonaid and in 2003 sealed documents suggested that Clonaid existed in name only and had no actual assets. 2003 was also the year that Rael became interested in female circumcision while on a speaking tour in Western Africa. (Raelians have been making missionary trips to Africa since 1982.) Three years after French urologist Pierre Foldés invented a procedure in 2004 to repair the damage of female circumcision Clit…

What Does Darwin Mean to You?

By Arri Eisen

…answer to the first is easy—overwhelming evidence. Evolution explains a vast number of facts that, in its absence, would be mere curiosities: the pattern of change in the fossil record, the presence of identical, functionless pseudogenes in all primates, the subtle infidelity of songbirds. To the second question, I point out that all conflict with scripture evaporates when Genesis is taken as allegory. The point of the Garden is not that two huma…

Catholic Sex Teaching is No Laughing Matter

By Marian Ronan

…ala, Cyprian Lwanga, opposed it, while the Vatican’s representative read a statement at the UN restating the Holy See’s opposition to “all grave violations of human rights against homosexual persons, such as the use of the death penalty, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.” And there is some possibility that the latest version of the bill does not include the capital punishment provision, though Peter Montgomery’s sources in…

Seeing the Future: Can Religion Evolve and Survive in a Changing World?

By Peter Savastano

…itself. Two questions I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the last number of years is what form, structure, and expression the phenomenon we call “religion” will take in the future (that is, if “religion” is then still labeled as such); or, conversely, is there a future for religion (specifically formal, organized, institutionalized religion as we presently recognize it) in a rapidly globalizing, postindustrial and postmodern world? Bac…

Religion vs. Science: America’s Perilous Fight

By Edward J. Larson

…is the best naturalistic explanation for the origins of species. In contrast, most religious Americans accept some form of creationism, with many of them opting for special creation over theistic evolution. In a democracy with compulsory education and public schools, this division plays out in biology classes around the country. Parents, students, teachers, and taxpayers informed by the dominant scientific view of origins expect that biology cour…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…suggest that 50 years after the gavel dropped in Schempp, some schools are still struggling when it comes to discussing the Good Book “objectively.” Recently, citing the Texas Public Information Act, Texas Freedom Network contacted those schools and asked that they provide it with their course materials. TFN then asked me to examine the accumulated boxes of syllabi, tests, handouts, lecture notes, and PowerPoint presentations for academic quality…

Gaza Play Sparks Mixed Reaction Among Jews

By Benjamin Weiner

…charges of anti-Semitism in an email to a Jewish-American director.) The most interesting reaction, to my mind, is represented by those Jews who have chosen to court controversy by appropriating the appropriation, participating in staged readings of Churchill’s play in Jewish settings. The Jewish Community Center in DC held one such event last week. Playwright Tony Kushner, a champion of “Seven Jewish Children,” will moderate a reading with schola…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…ity is about the mission field itself as a chance to put the body to the test. Just how treacherous was the mission field became the measure of one’s faith. Fulfilling the Great Commission meets adventure travel. It was in the mid-twentieth century that the switch from muscular to extreme occurred, as the global expansion of U.S. power aligned with the rise of Billy Graham (his famous New York City crusade was in 1957), the founding of Campus Crus…