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Reading Beinart and Lerner as Gaza Burns

By Ira Chernus

…he [imagined] danger through aggression and power.” As Beinart argues, the number of American Jews who act out of fantasied oppression is declining. But their political strength remains much greater than their numbers. Yet curiously Lerner, the professional psychologist, downplays this and the other psychological wellsprings of support for militant Zionism. Instead he focuses time and again on compassion for the very real historical sufferings of…

As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort

By Robert P. Jones

…he Bible is replete with language about the sins of one generation being visited down three or four generations (Exodus 20; Numbers 14; Deuteronomy 5; Jeremiah 32). This transmission isn’t mystical but is both genetic and cultural. Just as abuse begets abuse and addiction begets addiction, prejudice begets prejudice. In the Christian Scripture, Paul talks about the need to reckon not just with sinful individual nature but with “principalities and…

Why President Obama Should Not Visit the Western Wall

By Melissa Weininger

…hile the Wall, especially in the last year, has become a symbol of the opposite, the impediment to civil and human rights created by the Israeli civil government’s entanglement with official state religion. The Western Wall is a remnant of the retaining wall that surrounded the courtyard of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. For centuries, it has been a site for Jewish pilgrimage and worship, one of the holiest places on earth for Jews. Since the Si…

Rebranding the Mormons

By Joanna Brooks

…image of ourselves and our community that young and urbane Mormons love. (Site designers describe the site’s design principles as “joyful, reverent, inspiring, authentic, and relevant.”) It’s also clearly an effort to address the major PR problems facing the Church as it continues to contend with century-old stereotypes about Mormons as clannish polygamists as well as with recent fallout from its heavy involvement in California’s Proposition 8 ca…

The Leadership Failure of Park51

By Hussein Rashid

…r who grew up in the shadow of the Towers, there is pain in seeing how the site has been turned in theater. Thousands of people died on that site, but for New Yorkers, life goes on: we are building an office building on that site, and the surrounding neighborhood has rebounded nicely. The space is as hallowed as the ground of Murrah Federal Building. In this context, a visionary leader can affect real, positive change in the social fabric of Lower…

Former Employees: Racism & Abuse in Leading Religious Right Org.

By Sarah Posner

…ing continues to cite Tanton groups as authoritative, tellingly describing NumbersUSA as an “immigration reduction advocacy organization” in an August 2010 piece and citing FAIR in a story claiming that “illegal aliens” would “trump veterans at US medical offices.” Groening also praised a Mississippi immigration raid, citing the Mississippi Federation for Immigration Reform and Enforcement (MFIRE); listed on FAIR’s Web site as a “local group,” one…

On Zion’s Mount

By Jared Farmer

…Mormon version of Williamsburg, Virginia), to Martin’s Cove, Wyoming, the site of a terrible handcart disaster in 1856 that has been converted into a faith-promoting heritage site. These and other hallowed places allow Utah Mormons to commemorate the “pioneer trek” to the Great Basin. The sacred narrative of getting to Utah is more important than Zion itself. The other church program is the worldwide creation of temples: those special-use limited…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on converting others. As a result, Gallup revised its esti…

Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…’s traditions. This movement is impressive in that it seems to combine the best of education about religion with the best of a commitment to a different kind of spiritual practice that both embraces and transcends particular traditions. How has it been working so far? This is going to be a very long process. I do not expect people to turn themselves around immediately! And in many ways, compassion is counterintuitive to our Western culture, which…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…icult work. It’s even harder because The Public doesn’t like to answer its phones. Some people are more difficult to reach than others, such that these representative samples may not be so representative. Wuthnow points out that response rates for surveys have been declining steadily over the decades. Today, even a high-quality Pew study is unlikely to get even 25% of its randomly selected households to respond. Some recent Pew reports have reache…