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

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…a religious mission, one that it pursues through the [preschool]. The playground surface cannot be confined to secular use any more than lumber used to frame the Church’s walls, glass stained and used to form its windows, or nails used to build its altar.” But while Gorsuch’s opinion suggests that he would support even direct state subsidization of religious activities, Sotomayor argued that directly subsidizing a house of worship—even for ostensi…

Boo! Trump’s Lead With Religious Voters Not As Bigly As You Might Think

By Daniel Schultz

…ong a swing vote (Catholics) and perhaps even their base (Evangelicals and Mormons). That’s a real possibility: Hillary Clinton is a uniquely controversial candidate. A Democratic nominee more acceptable to Evangelical women matched up against a Trumpist candidate could turn today’s 66% Evangelical support into 2024’s 55%—or worse. If 2016 has taught us nothing else, of course, it’s that anything could happen. Even as I wrote this post, FBI Direct…

Trump with back to camera stands before a frenzied crowd with raised fist.

With ‘Vermin’ Remark Trump Crosses Fully into Nazi Territory

By Robert P. Jones

…iena College battleground state poll, which produced so much handwringing among Democrats, that survey did not actually demonstrate that “Trump Leads in 5 Critical States,” as the misleading reporting claimed. In every state except Nevada, the alleged leads were within the margin of error for the survey, which interviewed just over 600 people in each state. The headline should have read, “In Six Battleground States, Trump Leads One, Biden Leads on…

I Was Nearly Seduced by David Brooks’ Reasonable Analysis

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…contemporary economics, according to David Brooks, there are two dominant models of analysis: number crunching and psychology. Greenspan was a number cruncher, says Brooks, and unfortunately, human psychology caught up with him. Greenspan saw real estate values continuing to soar with no end in sight and allowed himself to be persuaded that they would never stop rising, and certainly would never fall. So he never had to think about petty psycholo…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…e, we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface as a culture. We have so many more models of how men lead than we do for women. Even though women have always been leading, we’ve had so many more men in positions we recognize as leadership. I think this is changing, but when people look at me in an authority role, the experiences they’ve had with women shape how they see me. They may not know how to think about me because they don’t have a suitable te…

“Split at the Root”: Adrienne Rich and (Religious) Identity

By Ryan Harper

…cross, the empty tomb, the via dolorosa. I am not always sure I want to be numbered among Christians; I know there are a number of Christians who aren’t so sure I should be so numbered. My examination occurs alongside my spouse’s examination. She is an ordained Baptist minister who with unspeakable grace regularly braves misogynistic condescension: the assumption among even thoughtful, well-meaning people that her spouse possesses the professional…

Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

By The Editors

…at we at RD covered all of the stories on Time’s list, everything from the Mormons to monks rioting in Tibet, the new evangelicals, the Kosher workplace debacle—and even the Catholic church on aliens.) 2.) Heading the list of TOP TEN RELIGION STORIES FROM RELIGION NEWS WRITERS is the “Pastors Gone Wild” story. Religion journalists agree that the top story of the year was that of presidential candidates and the pastors they kept company with; Jerem…

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

By Daniel Schultz

…nal love. I’m going to give it to my family and my friends and the people around me.” This drew a fair number of cheers from the audience. Even most Republicans support same-sex marriage these days. At the end of the event, Megyn Kelly directly invited the participants to discuss whether or not they’d “had a word from God” about their candidacy. Some viewers might question the appropriateness of such a question, but I thought it was okay. It is th…

What Do You Think?: “Padre Oprah” Scandal Has Many Asking Whether Priests Should Be Allowed to Marry

By Frances Kissling

…cdotal reports and expressed Vatican concern indicates that God is calling more homosexual men to the priesthood than heterosexuals. Celibacy still remains mandatory. Even high profile disobedience of the rule has no effect. The man Pope John Paul defended and befriended in spite of highly credible accusations of pedophilia, Marcial Maciel the founder of the ultra conservative Legion of Christ was finally acknowledged, after his death, to have had…

Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

By Danny Fisher

…g Burma’s Rohingya minority has been purposely aggravated by the fanatical monk U Wirathu and his “969 Movement.”) In his book An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, Peter Harvey chalks these seeming inconsistencies between Buddhist peacefulness in theory and practice up to “unresolved human fears and attachments aggravated by politically unstable times.” But whatever the reasons, this much is clear: the role of Buddhists and Buddhism in violence and…