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The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…des of Hanna-Barbera’s The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible. The number of Bible courses in Texas has gone up since 2007, when Texas passed a law encouraging schools to offer them. Texas is not alone in having such a statute; in recent years, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arizona have passed similar laws, and Bible bills are currently making their way through the Wyoming and Arkansas legislatures. While these laws typically urge teac…

Harry Reid vs. Islamic Cultural Center

By Joanna Brooks

…t’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Philadelphia after Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter tried to extract a six-figure sum from the Churc…

Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…. Islam is built upon ideas. If we contribute to the world of ideas in any way, but in particular in such a way that everyone benefits from the contributions, then we also contribute to Islam. This week, Tariq Ramadan wrote a piece for the Guardian lamenting the constraints of being described as a “Muslim intellectual and scholar.” It was the same as being assigned a pre-determined category which must speak about certain topics or his intentions a…

Obstacles for Secularists

By Sarah Posner

…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…

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

By Grant Gallicho

…a handbook for diocesan boards? What’s more, review-board members aren’t always clear on what amounts to sexual abuse. Does plying a minor with alcohol count? What about inappropriate tickling? The Charter sets the standard as “an offense by a cleric against the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue with a minor”—the one about adultery. That definition is vague enough to allow review boards to recommend actions against priests for a range of abusive…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…art, this is a religious debate. Some religious people think that the only way to fit in to a non-affirming religion is to change desires; others disagree asserting that desires rarely change much, and that living in accord with one’s religious beliefs is the proper aim. Change of orientation is not required for that. This “identity therapy” as Schumacher-Matos called it, is what the APA acknowledges as a proper way to recognize both the durabilit…

When Corporations are “Persons” Under the Law: The Real Problem With Health Care

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…stribute numbers of representatives state-by-state, by “counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed”; and Section Three excluded from future service any member of the government who had previously sworn an oath of office to the State and then joined the Confederacy in open rebellion. Predictable stuff, really. After winning the War, Washington intended to re-draw the electoral map and to prohibit southern states…

The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…ormal theological belief or conviction. However, they are prophetic in the way that the Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan imagines prophets in the his classic work The Mysticism of Sound and Music, where he writes, “In fact, music excels religion, for music raises the soul of man even higher than the so-called external form of religion… That is why in ancient times, the greatest prophets were great musicians.” Members of the Grateful Dead in S…

Dispatch from Charlottesville: “It Was a War Zone. It Felt Like There Were a Million Nazis.”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…terrupted (at 2:30 mark). Dr. Robyn can be seen in the background, facing away from the camera, wearing their yellow stole, and turning to run when the neo-Nazis arrived. Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza: The nazi groups just kept coming and coming. This is an exaggeration, but it felt like there were a million nazis, to like, 100 counter-protestors. That’s an exaggeration, but I’m just saying, that the number of nazis compared to counter-protestors w…