Religion Dispatches
…rnational, which address security for all religions. Are there established statistics showing increased multiple-victim shootings at Christian churches as opposed to other public venues? JH: Unfortunately, [there aren’t]… even the FBI’s statistics do not accurately track all shootings because in order for it to be put in a religious category, the incident has to be classified as a ‘hate crime,’ not just a shooting. Otherwise it just gets lumped to…
Read More…the larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trump evangelicals’ main argument about the suspe…
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…rth American Muslim life. Until Muslims become more involved in television and film, we will leave the telling of our own stories to others. As such, while we can and should protest against inaccurate descriptions, we also cannot expect others to tell our stories in the ways that we would like them to be told….
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…re majority of 52% of Mississippians voted to remove the language from the state constitution. Currently, Mississippi has the distinction of having one of the broadest explicitly anti-LGBT laws in the country: the state permits state-licensed child welfare agencies to refuse to place and provide services to children and families, including LGBT people and same-sex couples, if doing so conflicts with their religious belief; it permits state officia…
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…end the film—the theology less so, though it’s all worth discussing. The most astonishing aspect of what’s now a global conversation on theology and civil unions—Elton John thanked the Pope, and Cardinal Raymond Burke expressed expected horror—is that it’s based on scant data. That’s clue Number One that the topic is ripe for conversation and that people of varying views will use Pope Francis’ words to confirm their own positions. A look at the mo…
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…ation, leadership, and movement coherence—and political scientist and Baptist pastor Ryan Burge, who contends that the secular movement is “out of step” with the country and the religiously-ambivalent nones. Kevin Bolling, executive director of the Secular Student alliance, an organization with chapters on college campuses throughout the US, told RD that reading Boorstein’s report was “disheartening,” particularly given her record as “an accomplis…
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…andments as guideposts for student behavior. I will continue to fight against state-sponsored atheism that has caused society to go downhill. One can practically feel the flying spittle. And more importantly, none of this is accurate. The claim that our laws and Constitution are based on “Judeo-Christian” values—a problematic phrase, particularly in this context—are debunked in The Founding Myth, in which I also argued that the Ten Commandments ar…
Read More…place else,” Reid said Monday through a spokesman, after Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle demanded he take a position on the matter. It’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-lon…
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…as a whole. For the rest of Pride month, that flag hung over one the busiest streets in Chicago, outside the second-largest PCUSA church in the country, and offered thousands of people a loud and powerful declaration that queerness and Christianity do not have to be at odds—they can find home in the same place. A flag is not nearly enough—there is so much work that remains to be done. But it shows a glimpse of what our voice could be if we let it…
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…, Catholic opinion has long been about the same as public opinion, and mainstream Protestant opinion, as a whole and significantly more liberal than Evangelical opinion. The turning point for Catholic opinion catching up and in some cases surpassing Protestant opinion in terms of “liberalness” was the early 1980s. For instance, throughout the 1970s, Catholic support for abortion rights was “slightly lower than Protestant,” according to Tom Smith o…
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