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New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…lee over a new study that purports to show that “children raised by homosexual parents are dramatically more likely than peers raised by married heterosexual parents to suffer from a host of social problems.” Calling this study “the gold standard” of same-sex parenting studies, FoF’s afﬁliate CitizenLink crowed that among those “social problems” were “strong tendencies, as adults, to exhibit poor impulse control; suffer from depression and thought…

Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

By Michael Schulson

…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…

A Debate Rages in India Over Conversion, Secularism, and “Spiritual Violence”

By Murali Balaji

…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…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…th the APA are associated with churches and organizations which see homosexual behavior as immoral. There is debate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews materi…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…ct on the roles that men and women could do, on the level of institutional authority they could assume, but little had been done on how masculinity and femininity were actually thought of, and how theology changed these ideals. What I wanted to do was establish a “baseline” of normative ideas of gender among white Protestants by looking at Southern Baptists and Methodists. By examining the emergent Southern Holiness movement, I was able to see how…

And What of the Non-Jewish Jews?

By Shaul Magid

…ability, affiliation, and attitudes toward things such as Israel, the Holocaust, God, and religion. Interestingly, Zionism has been replaced by “caring for Israel,” which is in some ways similar, though there are important distinctions. Zionism represents a systemic Jewish experiment in identity, language, culture, and politics, while “Caring for Israel” is largely an emotional category that is often not founded on a deep knowledge of Zionism, nor…

There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

By Haroon Moghul

…lestinian Israeli activists are motivated less by ideology and more by “sexual identity problems.” Seriously. Setting that kind of tone will probably only encourage more and more absurd statements. The recent post on Jesus seems especially insensitive, considering who it is being directed to and where it is apparently originating. A number of Palestinians are Christians, and that Christianity is of course traced back to the time of Jesus himself….

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

This week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is holding its annual summer meeting in Seattle (to be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law bec…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…ning as these loose comparisons might be, it was what Riley did next that caused a brief media flurry and garnered coverage by MSNBC, Business Insider, and over two hundred blogs, news sites, and forums within days of the documentary’s release. Riley tracked down an Apple super-fan, Alex Brooks (editor of World of Apple), and had a team of neuroscientists study Brooks’ brain with an MRI scanner as he was shown pictures of various mp3 players, com…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…consin indicating that Buddhist monks and others who meditate regularly actually activate entire regions of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishi…