Religion Dispatches
…pro-life, and 47% pro-choice. But as the report he cited also shows, these numbers fluctuated slightly in a two month period; in May 2011 Gallup reported that “Americans are closely divided between those calling themselves ‘pro-choice’ and those who are ‘pro-life,’ now 49% and 45%, respectively, in Gallup’s 2011 update on U.S. abortion attitudes. This is similar to a year ago, when 45% were ‘pro-choice’ and 47% ‘pro-life.’ However, it is the first…
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…credited with coming up with the single greatest idea ever. After his five-year journey round the world on the HMS Beagle, Darwin returned home in 1836 with a collection of wildlife and the genesis of a truly revolutionary idea. A year after his return, he sketched the notion on which all of modern biology is based—a roughly drawn evolutionary tree, topped with the cautious caption, “I think.” I visited Darwin’s grave yesterday in London. He is bu…
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…nization understands them. (Full disclosure: I was slated to speak at this year’s American Atheists Convention in Phoenix, Arizona over Easter weekend before it was postponed until next year, and I remain slated to speak when the event is able to take place.) Fish, who hails from Michigan himself, contends that the “irresponsible and dangerous” exemptions from public health measures in response to the coronavirus pandemic that some governors have…
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…pportive and 50% are opposed, figures relatively unchanged in the last few years but that are up in comparison with data from 2016. The pattern noted above also holds here. 72% of white evangelicals oppose equal bathroom access for trans individuals, compared to 28% of nonreligious Americans, a figure that has essentially held steady since 2016. In a year that has been marked by some truly draconian anti-trans initiatives, such as Arkansas’s law b…
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…the church’s investment firm, called Ensign Peak Advisors. In just over 20 years, Ensign amassed $100 billion. That’s because the company only distributed funds twice, both times to for-profit entities, while continuing to invest the funds and acquire tithes from Mormons who donate 10% of their income in order “to gain access to the sacred spaces and saving rituals of a Mormon temple.” But mostly, this meteoric growth is because the IRS views Ensi…
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…an especially bountiful harvest that saved people from starvation, and one year could include several days of thanksgiving while other years had none at all. Days of fasting and humiliation also might be declared, for circumstances such as droughts, fires, or military defeats. Days of thanksgiving often came on Thursdays, to ensure that they did not interfere with or replace Sunday observances. America’s Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories Bruce D…
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…er: In 1961, I journeyed from the prairies of South Dakota to do my junior year of college in southern India. During that year abroad I encountered a depth of disease and hunger that changed my life. One could not step outside my campus walls without encountering the raw realities of people perishing from lack of food and living with leprosy. When I returned to the United States, I earned my M.Div. and Ph.D. in Christian social ethics from Boston…
Read More…in 2007, commenting, “By the way, I’m no Episcopalian. I’m Baptist.” That year—preceding his current national candidacy, just seven years after he was outfoxed by Bush in South Carolina—saw many oddly confessional claims from McCain on subjects religious. “It wasn’t so much a rejection of the Episcopal Church,” McCain said in October 2007 of his move to the North Phoenix Baptist Church. “I came into that church, I sat down, I got the message of r…
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…becoming changed, perhaps a little enlightened, by the process. Like most years, this year’s range of fiction films showed the ways cinema and religion can brighten each other’s paths, in a variety of ways that I’ll briefly note below. Meanwhile, the fiction of ranking films should be apparent: there is no singular truth in this process, and I would not expect a single other person in the world to agree completely with this list, in this order. B…
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…ge about one big one per decade. It’s too bad they’re so completely wrong. Year after year, more evidence piles up pointing to the truth of your theory. It has served as the fundamental basis of modern biology, paleontology, and anthropology, through which we understand life on earth more completely than ever before. To science, creationism since your time has offered mainly obfuscation. There’s more to them than science. As your birthday present,…
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