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No Bible-as-State-Book for Tennessee as Legislators Suffer “Symbol Fatigue”

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…reat state raptor. But to be fair, New Hampshire already had a state bird. Rep. Christy Bartlett raised this issue, asking “But now do we need a state raptor? Isn’t that a bird?” A reasonable question. She then went on to say that there were just too many bills like this—to which Rep. John Burt agreed. “If we keep bringing more of these bills and bills and bills forward that really I feel we shouldn’t have in front of us, we’ll be picking a state…

These Are the New Battlegrounds for LGBT Rights Under Trump

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ct, and is expected to be a key figure in the yet-to-be-announced plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. And Price is no friend to the gays. According to LGBT media watchdog GLAAD’s “Trump Accountability Project,” the Georgia Republican scored a zero (out of 100) on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Equality Scorecard, voted against repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and in favor of amending the Constitution to ban marriage equality. More…

Spiritual McCarthyism and the Catholic Vote

By Bill Berkowitz

…Obama’s National Catholic Outreach Coordinator] informing him of the three phone calls, requesting that he respond to my question: ‘I would like to know whether the Catholic National Advisory Council for Sen. Obama is still operative.’ He has not replied. Donohue’s statement continued: It would appear, then, that the group no longer exists. It is not hard to understand why. After being criticized by the Catholic League, Archbishop Joseph Naumann…

How Muslim Civic Activism Helped Pass California’s Prop 47

By Nick Street

…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…

Exclusive: Columnist Jonathan Merritt on his Sudden Departure From Religion News Service

By Kaya Oakes

…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…

Behind a Recent Stunt in Idaho Lies a Dangerous Theocratic Movement

By Chrissy Stroop

…nd indoctrinated into right-wing extremism. Abbott says she often receives phone calls from Idaho Republicans asking her what to do about the party’s extremism problem. Noting that the extremists “are organized, and they show up,” Abbott tells these concerned Republicans that they need to start showing up themselves if they want to reclaim their party and stop local officials from refusing to enforce state and federal directives. “You can’t just s…

Gay Marriage Supporters Rally People of Faith for Washington’s November Vote

By Nicole Neroulias

…uality. Both groups marched in Seattle’s Pride Parade last Sunday, and had representatives at the coalition’s first “people of faith” phone bank on Tuesday. Religious volunteers, they believe, can sway values voters by sharing personal stories about their own faith journeys toward supporting marriage equality, gay relatives and friends, explained Andy Grow, Washington United for Marriage press secretary. “In California, they talked a lot about rig…

Google’s Benevolent Interfaith Big Tent

By Lucia Hulsether

…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…

The Pope in My Pocket; We Are All Dilettantes Now

By Michael A. Elliott

…or sell for under two dollars). And unlike the internet, the space of the iPhone feels not just private, but personal. Yes, the iPhone might be my means of connection with the world—it is, after all, a phone—but it is also my own little password-locked garden that I carry with me wherever I go. Moreover, I can remake the landscape with a few flicks of my fingers whenever I choose. As a result, the territory necessarily mixes the sacred and the pro…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…