Religion Dispatches
…ancestry generations ago, a Jewish spouse, Jewish friends etc. In terms of numbers, Jews by religion or no religion make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, but if you add “People with a Jewish affinity” it rises to 2.7%, so that this category of people who are not considered Jews by the Jewish community but identify as Jews is nearly 25% of the Jews by religion or no religion, those we conventionally call “Jews.” The fact that there are so many Ameri…
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…nted for 60% of employment in 1979 accounted for only 46% by 2012; and the number of persons not in the labor force is growing. While some are getting richer, the numbers tell us, middle income earners are hobbled by shrinking purchasing power, disappearing job opportunities, and increasingly out-of-reach education. This is problem enough for the many who work hard and can’t figure out why they’re “losing ground,” as Pew wrote. Add to that fears o…
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…disappearing tradition is stoked primarily by demographics. Indian census numbers show that the percentage of those identifying as Hindus dipped below 80 percent for the first time. But while there is much talk about a rising Muslim population, the actual spikes have come among Christians, where the mass conversion of tribal groups and Dalits has been part of a sustained and systematic effort of “Great Commission” movements such as the Joshua Pro…
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…administration and the mandate. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And starting around 2012, white Catholics broke for the GOP by historic margins. It’s also worth noting, as Michael Sean Winters has, that this occurred around the time the administrative staff of the bishops’ confer…
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…ion in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in th…
Read More…es about sexual diversity in schools and even volunteered to help burn all books related to the subject. The ban was implemented in October after the United Nations Children’s Fund issued a guidebook for teachers on avoiding discrimination between girls and boys and achieving gender equality. “We’re not going to promote gender ideology,” Education Minister Enrique Riera told local media earlier this year. “We’re going to base ourselves on what is…
Read More…ss, and fifteen were reported to be suffering ill effects. In spite of the number of people who experienced difficulties during each of the eight fifteen-minute rounds, Ray contends he did not know that there were problems. In fact, Ray is accused of ignoring the pleas of those who wanted out; in one case an individual went out through the side of the sweat lodge to escape the heat. The prosecution played tapes of Ray before the sweat saying, “It’…
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…other thing is, this is a personal plea to white clergy—we didn’t have the numbers. White clergy did not respond to this. https://www.facebook.com/publictheologian/photos/a.832371280191875.1073741829.832236016872068/1364676620294669/?type=3&theater What does that feel like for you, as a trans queer Latinx, who is also public theologian and activist working in these spheres? What does that absence from white clergy signal to you and others who hold…
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…“Harvard of the Sunni world” and that “they have put their imprimatur on a book, which is a codification of Sharia across all the various Sunni legal schools.” (There is, as previously explained, no “codification” of shari’ah, and Al-Azhar isn’t considered the “Harvard” of anywhere.) McCarthy, author of the books The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America and How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda, links both President Obama and th…
Read More…spirituality, meaning-making, and self-realization in my Nones Beyond the Numbers narrative survey.* *The survey results will contribute to three intertwined research projects I am currently conducting on the meaning-making practices of Nones. The first, sponsored in part through the Social Science Research Council’s “New Directions in the Study of Prayer” initiative, will explore the plurality of Nones who say they regularly engage in prayer….
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