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How Obama Made Gun Control A Religious Freedom Issue

By Sarah Posner

…expand the rights of religious outsiders—for example, LGBT people or women using birth control. Conservative support for unregulated gun ownership hinges on portraying gun ownership as freedom, and government regulation as tyranny or oppression. In both instances, the “rights” are centered on the person claiming them (the person owning the gun, or the person claiming infringement of religious liberty), and exclude or ignore the rights of other peo…

Religion Reporting as Therapy? Praying for Help with Budget Crisis…

By Michael J. Altman

…how the Church of Tiger Woods is also burning to the ground. Baptists are using their presences in the military to oppose the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. Fearing, as the Rev. David Mullis, the Southern Baptists’ military chaplaincy coordinator put it, “if there was a prohibition about certain kinds of literature that did not espouse homosexuality, I can see the Bible being banned in the military.” The Southern Baptist Convention has also turn…

#VanillaISIS, White Tears and the Adventures of Captain Moroni

By Megan Goodwin

…ick to emphasize that the Bundys are extremists—some Saints on Twitter are using a #NotAllMormons hashtag to distance themselves—and that the LDS Church is increasingly approaching the American religious mainstream. The Bundys’ Mormonism is certainly newsworthy, but it’s a headline, not a punchline. There’s been no discussion, however, of the ways the Bundys’ Mormonism intersects with the other major social media responses to the standoff: that is…

Does the Bible Really Call Homosexuality an “Abomination”?

By Jay Michaelson

…thing—but it doesn’t mean all of that. Progressive religionists must stop using the word “abomination” to refer to toevah. The word plays into the hands of fundamentalists on the one hand, and anti-religious zealots on the other, both of whom want to depict the Bible as virulently and centrally concerned with the “unnatural” acts of gays and lesbians. In fact, toevah is mostly about idolatry, and male homosexual behavior is only as abominable as…

Religious Freedom Advocates Warn of “Theocratic Zones of Control”

By Patricia Miller

…iberty trumping all other concerns.” He says social conservatives are now “using laws like RFRA to erode rights, programs and services that they wish to eliminate entirely but have been unable to do so directly through other means.” Both Clarkson and Sonfield note that the successful expansion of religious liberty claims is being driven by a distorted notion of religious freedom. Where traditionally religious freedom was defined as an individual’s…

Challenging Plantation Capitalism: Rev. Barber’s Holy Cause

By Tefere Gebre

…the future of the South through the framing of a Third Reconstruction. In using this framing, he challenges us to understand that history can go both forwards and backwards—that, as he puts it, “black people in North Carolina had more political power in 1868 than they did in 1968.” He urges us to see the Reconstruction period and the great 20th century civil rights era as times when a different kind of America came close to being born. And he ack…

The Porn Workaround: How Christian Sexuality Websites Avoid Sin

By Kelsy Burke

…and should be a part of a godly marriage. He chooses his words carefully, using “breast” and “crotch” instead of more vulgar alternatives. There are no images to accompany his instructions, but none are needed to imagine the sexual scene he sets. I interviewed creators and users of Christian sexuality websites and asked whether the sexual nature of the content worried them. Surprisingly, no one seemed very concerned. How are they so confident tha…

Spinning But Not Religious: Inside the New Economy of Spiritual Fitness

By Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst

…scinating when you look at the history of it, in the sense that it and I’m using very broad brush strokes here, but that it effectively evolved from warrior training, male-only warrior training 2,000 years ago to fast forward to last century and it’s this kind of hippy practice, then it’s kind of taken up later primarily by women—and candidly, affluent women. Now it is starting to include more men as it in some ways takes on or “rediscovers” some…

Obama’s Oil-Soaked Prayers

By Johnny P. Flynn

…ors are pretty much dependent on the oil companies to stop the flow of oil using experimental technology. In spite of the president’s rhetorical promise to “kick some asses,” it is not advisable to blacken the eyes of the people who have the technology to stop blackening the beaches in six states or more. So, what can we do? Educate yourself. While reading about the state of planet can lead one to stand on a mountaintop and shout at the sky, a bet…

Of Birds and Buddhists: Wildlife Rehab, NYC Style

By Jay Wexler

…hem after learning that scores of local Buddhists had been releasing large numbers of turtles into the park’s waters, where they are ill-suited to live. Buddhists believe that releasing injured or threatened animals can bring good karma to animal and releaser alike, but practiced without care and in large numbers, these releases can cause great damage. Things are even worse overseas, in places like Taiwan, where “mercy release” has become big busi…