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Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ves Humanist service members access to Army Chaplaincy services, including spiritual counseling and gathering spaces for Humanist groups. It also means that the numbers and distribution of Humanists in the military can be tracked along with those of other religious groups, potentially inviting a reshaping of the military chaplaincy, which critics complain is inappropriately weighted in favor of Christian, and specifically Evangelical Christian, de…

The Fretting About Whether Democrats Are “Friendly” To Religion

By Sarah Posner

…9% of Catholics go to church more than once a week; 33% attend weekly. But 19% attend only once or twice a month; 20% only a few times a year, and a combined 19% seldom or never. That would mean that a good chunk of Catholics probably didn’t receive the bishops’ bulletin insert on abortion in the health care bill at mass. Moreover, only 19% of Catholics believe “there is only one true way to interpret the teachings of my religion” while 77% belie…

Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…on gap on the issues as well as growing media coverage in China, where only 15 % of LGB people are out to friends and family and only 5% publicly. Variety reports: “The younger the respondent the higher the proportion of those opposed to the pathological view of homosexuality, stereotype-based prejudices, gender binary ideas, and even HIV-related stigma” says the report in its introduction. The report does not focus specifically on connections bet…

The Pundits and the Dominionists

By Julie Ingersoll

…any other name) a Reconstructionist? And as Gerson noted in his essay, the number of people who can be labeled in this way would “fit in a phone booth.” (Actually there are significantly more than he recognizes, but I take his point.) My point, though, is that this is the wrong question. Far more interesting, I think, is to look at the influence of Christian Reconstruction; how has it impacted the style of the conservative Christianity that makes…

The War On Terror Is Over

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…alled for an increase of a hundred thousand troops, which would double the number presently there. Yet it will still be half of the numbers of Russian troops that the former Soviet Union had deployed in Afghanistan—and it lost the war, dragging much of the Soviet economy down with it. A similarly dismal prognosis is in store for America’s continuing presence in Afghanistan. Moreover, the persistence of US troops in the region will continue to prov…

Census Reveals Gay People are Shockingly… Normal

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

According to new census figures, the number of people reporting that they are living with a same-sex partner has risen 52 percent in the last decade. That’s almost 902,000 people who are living all across the United States. Even here in my own incredibly conservative state of South Carolina, the number of same-sex couples increased and a quarter of them are raising children. It’s those kinds of facts that have right-wing media like the Christian…

New Research Links Spiritual-Not-Religious to Mental Disorder

By Elizabeth Drescher

…es. Is it an existential framework in itself—something that participants in 12-step groups find without necessarily referencing religion or spirituality and that the non-religious have sorted out in other ways—rather than its structuring in specifically religious terms that is psychologically beneficial? An atheist friend put it this way: “Maybe SBNRs are going nuts because, on one frequency, they keep thinking there’s got to be something else, an…

YOU Are Spiritual But Not Religious: The Secret Spiritual History of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books

By Daniel Silliman

…e those classics, the story is built on a key idea of the American mode of spirituality known as “spiritual but not religious.” The Choose Your Own Adventure series that Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery created in the late 1970s is sometimes connected to wishy-washy modern practices of believing. The series title itself was even used as a put-down by Andrew Sullivan in a post on those who mix-and-match or take-and-leave and treat religious ideas…

As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ere the dominant ethnic group in the multi-ethnic Balkans. However, between 1299 and 1453, the the Ottoman Empire conquered much of the Orthodox Christian world—including the Serbian Empire—and the Albanians converted to Islam, greatly elevating their status in an empire in which Muslims were most certainly at the top of the pecking order. This is the origin of much of the anti-Albanian sentiment, not only in Serbia, but throughout the Balkans. It…

UPDATED: Oklahoma Personhood Bill Not Dead…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…e for their unwillingness to put their reassurances in writing, proposed a number of amendments. So did other legislators, such that by the time SB-1433 was scheduled to be voted on, it was groaning under the weight of amendments. But the real turnaround came when Speaker Steele proposed an amendment to an amendment that, in essence, would have given teeth to the reassurances that the Oklahoma bill would do no more than the Missouri language. Tha…