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Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

By Daniel Schultz

…mpanion kept 95.7% of it.) It’s possible this is part of a larger trend. A number of paragraphs down there’s mention of a long-delayed vote on the future of the denomination, which might lend credibility to the headline, but no details are given, so it’s not possible to evaluate the claim. Likewise, near the top of the story comes a paragraph with a quote from an RCA pastor about the financial difficulties this will create. Does he speak for the d…

Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

By Marian Ronan

…either in one “ovotestis” or with one ovary and one testis). An increasing number of public and commercial health insurance companies now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at leas…

Speaking with Palestinian-American Republican Who Confronted GOP at Debate

By Haroon Moghul

…at the first “sign of adversity.” Good for him. Refusing to go away is the best way to fight bigotry. It would be easier to disappear, and a lot more troublesome to demand that the GOP consider that it could have a bigger tent if it stopped playing to such a narrow base. One day, sooner or later, I’m sure they’ll see the benefit in that. For now, both Romney and Gingrich, and the Republican establishment, would do well to note that there is an inc…

Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

By Katherine Stewart

…he one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” The right to the free exercise of re…

The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

By Ismar Volić

…rning artificial ethnic segregation into streams of money that fill their coffers. Bosnia is a country with no prospects, its only claim to fame the incessant flood of its fleeing youth, who barely glance in the rearview mirror as they search for a better life elsewhere. Traces of what led to Bosnia’s demise are unnervingly apparent in the United States. Our political system is a knotted web of malfunctioning processes that propagate and amplify t…

A Queer Atheist In the Heart of Mormon Country

By Chris Stedman

…But as was evident at this year’s Utah Pride, there is also a fast-growing number of Mormons who are working for change. They may be less visible—after all, our society, and the media in particular, privilege polarizing perspectives—but these Mormons are there, doing difficult but important work. Among them is Joanna Brooks, who served as the Mormon panelist at the conference. She has been an advocate for LGBTQ equality and acceptance among Mormon…

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…

“One of Us”: Rick Santorum and the Politics of (Very Big) Family

By Kathryn Joyce

…claimed, “We win if we just keep having children, ’cause we’re going to outnumber them!”—a staple argument of the Quiverfull movement. Weeks earlier, Santorum had transformed this rhetoric into policy proposal at a South Carolina Fuddruckers appearance with the Duggars, where he argued that low birth rates and a declining American population (also longstanding concerns among the Quiverfull movement) should be fought by tripling the child tax deduc…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ns 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 astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…

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

By Grant Gallicho

…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 became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…