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How Thanksgiving Became All Dinner, No Worship

By Bruce David Forbes

…nce of the Puritan holy day, although they eventually relented. By the late 1800s even Protestant worship services saw declining attendance, so much so that various churches held joint Thanksgiving services in order to draw decent-sized crowds. Today a number of Christian churches provide no worship service at all on Thanksgiving Eve or Day. Honoring it as a special time for families to get together, the churches are content to raise Thanksgiving…

DADT Repeal: The New “Religious Freedom” Issue

By Sarah Posner

…ty of this hurried vote may well be the religious freedom of chaplains and Service members.” Blomberg continued, “We hope that our nation’s leaders will work to ensure that none of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines are ever made to choose between serving their country or obeying their God as result of this damaging policy decision. And ADF stands ready to defend Service members if they are ever unconstitutionally required to make that cho…

DREAMing of Faith

By Sarah Posner

…new Washington Post poll finds that 70% of white evangelicals support open service by gays and lesbians in the military (although this poll shows a wide differential from a Pew poll which found only 43% of white evangelicals support open service). Still, though, there are plenty of religious people and religious leaders who support repealing DADT. You could make just as strong a moral argument about that as about immigration or nuclear nonprolifer…

As Hobby Lobby Heads to SCOTUS, Let’s Ditch Kosher Butcher Analogies

By Sarah Posner

…r (1985), another unanimous decision – a religious exemption would require customers, employees, or competitors to bear a heavy cost in the service of another’s religion, something the Court has understandably been loath to sanction. That said, though, it’s hard to imagine (a) the government requiring kosher butchers to sell pork, except in the conservative imagination where the government persecutes religious believers and (b) in any case, why th…

SCOTUS Likely to Support Memorial Cross; Should We Even Care?

By Andrew L. Seidel

…lem. It’s a Christian symbol that our government is either imposing on all service members, including non-Christians, or that excludes non-Christians who have served from equal memory and honor. Either way, it divides us. State-church separation promotes equality. Without a strict separation of state and church, one religion will inevitably be favored. Which should it be? Odds are, it won’t be yours. Christianity? Which one? Mormons, Jehovah’s Wit…

Mormon “Martin Luther” Causes Stir by Uploading LDS Church Handbook of Instructions to Internet

By Joanna Brooks

…trol (and double-speak) has served as a form of cultural survival since the 19th century US crusade against polygamy, as the anthropologist Daymon Smith has observed. During the mid 20th century, Mormon leaders initiated an administrative process called “correlation” to try to systematize and simplify Church doctrine in the service of worldwide proselytizing and coordination. Top-down correlation may have met its match in the world of the Internet…

Will Internet Kill Mormonism Too? Or Just Missionaries?

By Holly Welker

…posedly the new smoking, I see this as a very serious health threat for the 18- to 21-year-olds who constitute the bulk of the missionary force. At least the more familiar approach, of walking up stairs in apartment buildings to knock on doors and of traveling to meetings and appointment by bike, provided good cardiovascular exercise. On my mission, I generally rode my bike at least ten to 15 hours a week. Admittedly, the Referral Center Mission i…

Sarah Palin’s Freedom Cookie

By Anthea Butler

…s and people serving for the right reasons” is an important part of public service. When the school’s chancellor gave her the opportunity to announce her candidacy, the crowd cheered. Of course, she gave the good stock answer about needing to pray and consult her family, but that if she ran, she’d be “in it to win it.” The real takeaway from this speech is that it framed Palin’s worldview of American exceptionalism, Christian exceptionalism, and G…

The Democrats, The Gays, And The Evangelicals

By Sarah Posner

…dangerous person” because he’s moving the country toward “socialism.” The pair reportedly agreed to disagree — about whether the president is a dangerous socialist! Now that must have been a worthwhile conversation. The White House wouldn’t comment, but didn’t deny that DuBois had phoned Jeremiah. But the question is: why would he? Jeremiah is a protégé of end-times populizer Tim LaHaye whose website is devoted entirely to spinning the day’s news…

Citizen Speech in an Age of Data: Or, Why I’m Transcribing My Tweets Into Cuneiform

By Andrew Aghapour

…ite to join the ranks of Mail A Spud and Send Your Enemies Glitter— a cute service designed to make easy profit. Yet Dumb Cuneiform seems somehow different. The profit margins can’t be high on hand-stamped cuneiform tablets (they sell, shipped, for $20— only twice the cost of a mailed potato). Dumb Cuneiform is also making a sly bit of commentary about online speech. It juxtaposes tweets, which are effortless to write, with a labor-intensive writi…