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Why is the State Department Opening an Office of “Religious Engagement”?

By Austin Dacey

…e of law, and minority rights in their societies. When the U.S. government bestows high-level diplomatic attention instead on select (typically male, adult, and non-democratically appointed) spokespersons, it aids them in consolidating their own power and authority within their communities. The Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group does not ignore this potential for discrimination. It writes of the importance of partnering with “women religiou…

Atheists Gather in Burbank: A Humanist’s Response

By Anthony B. Pinn

…with their inability for critical self-reflection and critique are not the best champions of healthy life orientations. I remain hopeful that collaboration and partnership will be difficult to achieve but not impossible. I am not calling for a naïve stance marked by blindness—either to the deep dimensions of our differences, or to the great harm that theistic (and atheistic) perspectives can produce when they nurture bad ethics. I left Burbank thi…

David Brat: Catholic, Calvinist, and Libertarian, Oh My!

By Julie Ingersoll

…model, is severely restrained in its authority over economic activity. The best check on the depravity of individuals who make up the civil government is the decentralization of authority into the distinct spheres; the best check on the depravity of human beings in the economy is the decentralization of the market created by competition. Historian Michael McVicar has this called this “theocratic libertarianism”: it creates an economic zone free of…

Black Lives Matter Activists Disrupt Presidential Candidates at Activist Conference

By Daniel Schultz

…long as those needs get the response they deserve. As it happens, even the best of leaders blow it once in a while. The trick is to recover as best you can, while maintaining the human connection. Politicians don’t have to be Jesus, but if you can’t occasionally set the prepared speech aside and invite people to share their suffering, then as a candidate you’re not worth a bucket of warm piss, to use John Nance Garner’s colorful expression. In tha…

Sam Harris and the New Islamophobes, Deconstructed

By Hamdan Azhar

…ates, and the men who treat their wives and daughters like chattel—are the best examples of the doctrine in practice.” This is the same man who says, about Islam, “All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.” Often his arguments seem to be poor attempts to plagiarize from the protocols of the elders of neo-conservatism. But even Bernard Lewis, one of the leading defenders of t…

“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”: Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate

By Edward J. Larson

…Dawkins likes to put it, a “blind watchmaker.” Dawkins’ books have become bestsellers in the United States and Britain, and his vision of human evolution (or more precisely, the vision of it that he popularized from the work of such preeminent late-twentieth-century biologists as William Hamilton and E.O. Wilson) is shared by many evolutionary biologists today. Humans, like all living organisms, “are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly progr…

Defying Gravity Defies Sci-Fi Conventions

By Gabriel Mckee

…his is very much a primetime soap opera. The show’s Wikipedia page puts it best: “romantic entanglement will occur.” Come for the spacefaring science, stay for the melodrama. (Or is it the other way around?) But Defying Gravity isn’t just concerned with the characters’ “entaglements.” As in the work of Philip K. Dick, our earthborn religion is a concern as well, particularly in the pilot episode (available on Hulu through September 7th). As the sh…

Creationism and Global Warming Denial: Anti-Science’s Kissing Cousins?

By Lauri Lebo

…as with evolution, Shaman said that climate scientists haven’t been their best advocates in responding to attacks of misinformation. He said climate change desperately needs a Ken Miller, the Brown University biology professor best known for his cheerful smackdowns of creationists and intelligent design proponents. “Climate change requires people to get out there and talk about it,” Shaman said. “You need people like [Miller] who get out and arti…

Election Reporters: Here’s Why Simply Descriptors Like ‘Christians’ Can Have Enormous Consequences

By Daniel Schultz

…For a lot of reasons, conservative Christians tend to own the cultural megaphone today. (Most important among them: conservative judges endorsing extremist conservative Christian arguments.) So I don’t expect the average person to understand all the nuances. But journalists covering national politics, especially those on the Trump beat, need to do better. Here’s why. First of all, it’s a matter of accuracy. As Sarah Posner points out on Bluesky, t…

Sure, There’s No ‘Religious Left’… If You Ignore Non-White Christians and Non-Christians

By Daniel Schultz

…s, and single-issue groups that make up a loose coalition that despite the best efforts of the Religion-Industrial Complex, cheerfully and successfully resists just about anything in the way of central coordination. Jenkins sees this as a distributed movement, and likes to point to areas where it’s played a crucial role in progressive successes in recent years. (Some of his most interesting reporting has been about Indigenous religious activism ar…