Religion Dispatches
…ious believers—a striking shift from the hard-hitting argumentation of the New Atheist movement—and ends up humanizing atheism while he’s at it. New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and so on—have been all about the polemic. But you chose to write in a very different genre: memoir. Why? Interfaith work gives a central place to the idea of exchanging stories to create more understanding and enrich the quality of the con…
Read More…ay (and perhaps on Wednesdays and whenever the church is open). The good news here is that “gay” is apparently no longer a strong enough slur that a completely new frame is having to be set for the debate. But “unnatural vice” just doesn’t seem to roll off the tongue like “gay.” In addition, “unnatural vice” would seem to be too broad a category. I know plenty of straight people who have some “unnatural vices” of their own, like, perhaps, callin…
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…ment, however, bin Laden is dead, and Tahrir Square has challenged both the strategic value and the moral legitimacy of the jihadi stance. The legion of young Muslim activists around the world have received a new standard for challenging the old order, and a new form of protest, one that discredits terrorism as the easy and ineffective path and chooses the tough and profitable road of nonviolence….
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…der Studies Department of the University of South Alabama to talk about my new book. During my lecture I faced a standing room crowd of heretics, fence sitters, curiosity seekers, and true believers bracing for a circus sideshow. Traveling across America to speak on freethought and abolitionism during the 19th century, white feminist atheist Ernestine Rose was smeared as being a “thousand times below a prostitute.” Centuries after Rose, the associ…
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…umber of key credibility markers.” Or any, really. Of course, one evidence-free bit of “news” is not in itself notable in this media landscape. But this isn’t the first time this rumor has been reported as fact and acceptable uncritically. Earlier this year there were a rush of such reports by conservative commentators such as the American Conservative‘s Rod Dreher, National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru and Fox New’s Brit Hume. Each referenced, as evid…
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…matter what your path, can be a really fruitful one. You’ve befriended a number of lesbian musicians since you came out, Mary Gauthier and Chely Wright, for example. I just met Mary in this last year. We did a show together in January, and I just loved her music. It wasn’t until I became friends with her that I realized that she was a lesbian. It definitely broadens the scope of conversation. The artists I’ve met have encouraged me not to fear…
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…USA might adopt this rhetoric to affirm the position of its fairly sizable number of dissenting presbyteries, but is it really accurate? The word “tradition” tends to connote a sense of fixity and stability, an impression that “this is the way marriage always was,” leaving “gay marriage” to represent a sharp and dramatic historical rupture. Yet this way of thinking is only possible because of a certain historical amnesia. In fact, it would be far…
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…, which gave me many opportunities to see it in action. Last month, Tufts’ Freethought Society hosted a panel on the role of atheists in interfaith efforts. I was fortunate enough to sit on the panel alongside experienced interfaith activists like Rabbi Or Rose, Valarie Kaur, Jen Bailey, and Chris LaTondresse (with whom I later, over a beer, debated about the existence of Christ). Eboo Patel, Founder and President of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFY…
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…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….
Read More…yrocketing. As Charlayne Hunter-Gault reports in the May 28th issue of the New Yorker, more than two-thirds of African countries criminalize consensual acts between persons of the same sex. Even in South Africa, the first country in the world to constitutionally ban discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, anti-LGBT violence is a major problem, with “corrective rape” and murder of lesbians on the upsurge. At the same time that anti-gay…
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