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Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…tools it would still constitute one of the world’s largest games of “whack-a-mole.” In light of near universal calls for Twitter, Facebook, Ask.fm and other social media sites to suppress extremist content from public view, a number of questions arise. Some are practical: how many Twitter employees speak or read Arabic or Urdu or Farsi, etc.? Should these requests be given preferential treatment over other offensive content like child pornography…

What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…argued that directly subsidizing a house of worship—even for ostensibly non-religious expenses such as playground surfaces—is proscribed by the Establishment Clause. It’s notable that the Court has previously declined to require religious organizations to distinguish between their religious and secular activities. A 1987 decision, Corporation of the Presiding Bishop v. Amos, involved an Establishment Clause challenge to a religious exemption that…

Mormonism’s “9/11 Mosque Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…ithout problems, as my RD colleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…tory. One teacher’s treatment of Genesis focused on ways to reconcile young-earth and old-earth theories by suggesting that each of the six days was unusually long, or that a lengthy gap elapsed between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2-3. Another teacher’s resource materials included a religious tract claiming that NASA had discovered a missing day in time that proved Joshua 10’s story of the sun standing still. One district’s slideshow on archaeology’s verifi…

Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

By Danny Fisher

…what happened… If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures.” As Buddhist scholar Stephen Jenkins counsels, “We must be careful to understand what ‘nonviolence’ means [when the Dalai Lama uses the term]. Under the right conditions, it could include killing a terrorist.” Indeed, the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism’s co-authors, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and Robert E. Buswell, Jr., have it rig…

Updated: G-O-D Plays a Bit Part in First GOP Debate

By Daniel Schultz

…onent will hit. Except of course Trump, who went after everybody with a two-by-four. Even the god talk—normally red meat for the Republican base—was strangely attenuated. Walker, as is his wont, dodged Kelly’s question about whether his opposition to abortion even in the case of rape or incest put him out of the mainstream (it does) by saying he is now and always has been pro-life. According to Walker, that’s “a position that’s in line with everyd…

“That Guy In Rome”: A Catholic Town in Idaho Where The Pope is a Heretic

By Jason Wilson

…or a chat with assistant pastor, Father Anthony Short. Father Short is only 25, having gone straight from home-schooling under traditionalist parents into St. Joseph seminary in Rathdrum, and then into the major seminary in Omaha, from whence he returned to be deputy pastor. Father Anthony Short He was sincere—even guileless—in conversation, not least in his explanation of the “Masonic infiltration of the Church,” whose first major success was the…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…Strong, an early Social Gospel leader who ended up championing the Spanish-American War and the need for “Anglo-Saxons” to Christianize the world. Also the deeply reactionary James W. Fifield, Jr., a pivotal architect of Southern California anti-union conservatism, and Kenneth Hagin, the godfather of the hugely influential Word of Faith movement. A few minor quibbles: at one point Lehmann has late 18th-century “Calvinists” pitted against “Congreg…

Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…

First U.S. Visit of the Virgin Mary Confirmed in Wisconsin

By Lewis Wallace

…g needs to visitors on scuffed-up laminated pages. If it weren’t for a port-a-john next to the parking lot, the whole scene in this snow-covered countryside could be taking place in the 1950s, or even the 1880s, when the current chapel was first built. The Virgin Mary’s First Visit to the U.S. All this peace and quiet is about to disappear. On December 8, 2010, Bishop David L. Ricken of the Diocese of Green Bay concluded a two-year investigation i…