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

By Kaya Oakes

…her would delete 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 unco…

Behind a Recent Stunt in Idaho Lies a Dangerous Theocratic Movement

By Chrissy Stroop

…a project of the JBS and the Council for National Policy, pushes Christian schools and homeschooling so that children can be closely controlled by their parents and 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…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…circles, is approximately 3.1415. I say approximately because pi is a transcendental number, meaning that its decimal digits actually go on forever, unpredictably. As far as mathematicians can tell, those numbers never settle into any kind of pattern. This numerical lawlessness is quite the thorn in the side of human pattern-loving brains. It’s like peeling back the skin of the universe and finding pure randomness. After the existential surprise…

Bishop Minerva Carcaño Has a Nearly Impossible Job

By Mary E. Hunt

…regardless of legal status. Whether preaching in one of her churches or discussing specific cases with Lou Dobbs, she insists that immigration is not about “partisan politics” but of “lifting up a matter of conscience for this country, a moral and ethical issue. It is from that perspective that the United Methodist Church speaks.” Bishop Carcaño seeks to develop a consistent ethic of justice. On matters of same-sex love, this is not as easy as…

“Americans Hate Muslims, Too” (And Other Impediments to U.S. Advocacy for Religious Freedom Abroad)

By Chad Bauman

…ewhere, India’s Christians suffer from various forms of social and legal discrimination, and are vandalized, kidnapped, or attacked (occasionally even fatally) about 250-350 times a year. This is a serious problem, and one deserving international approbation. However, the repression and persecution of India’s Christians pales in comparison to that of its Muslim minority. In the decades since India’s independence in 1947, thousands of Muslims have…

Trump, Islamophobia, and the Philly Pig’s Head Incident

By David Krueger

…ince the attacks in Paris, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has described anti-Muslim sentiment as “unprecedented” and documented dozens of incidents where individual Muslims or Islamic sites have been subjected to intimidation, threats, or violence. Anti-Muslim rhetoric has reached a fever pitch ever since it was discovered that the two shooters in the San Bernardino tragedy on December 2 were self-radicalized supporters of ISIS. Jerry F…

The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

By Patricia Miller

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

From Shofars to Hammers: The Spiritual Warriors of MAGA are ‘ReAwakening’ to Political Violence

By Mark Clatterbuck

…lements—from the relentless attacks on transgender youth consistent with fascist scapegoating, to the steady drumbeat of election fraud claims, to accusations that Dr. Fauci engineered Covid-19 in a Chinese lab to help a demonic cabal in Davos to impose a one-world government over freedom-loving Americans like themselves. Emboldened by their movement’s surging popularity, speakers repeatedly embraced the once-toxic label of “Christian nationalist”…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…at will American readers make of this message? Mercy is not something we discuss very often. Our rates of incarceration, the number of states utilizing the death penalty, our obsessive clinging to the Second Amendment along with its deadly consequences, ICE raids on immigrant families fleeing even worse violence in their home countries, drone strikes, the environmental violence of fracking, deforestation and coal mining, and the daily threats face…

The Resurgence of Right-Wing Anti-Semitic Conspiracism Endangers All Justice Movements

By Ben Lorber

…ponsible for orchestrating the migrant caravan. Across the ideological landscape of Trumpism, there roam a number of such specters—not only “socialists” and Soros, but “globalists” and “Cultural Marxists,” among others—painting a picture of rootless, nefarious forces on a mission to subvert traditional American values. We’ve seen this before. Throughout the 20th century, insurgent far-right movements deployed conspiracy theories about shadowy soci…