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Satanic Temple’s IRS Recognition Rekindles Fierce Debate Over What Is ‘Really Real’ Church

By Joseph Laycock

…ances. The real reason to seek tax-exempt status is that this presents the best possible evidence that TST is a “real religion” rather than “trolls,” political satire, or—in LifeSiteNews’s terms—an “anti-religion.” The late religious historian J.Z. Smith wrote that, “The Internal Revenue Service is, both de facto and de jure, America’s primary definer and classifier of religion. It reproduces the imperial Roman government’s efforts at distinguishi…

Millennials Put Off By Rigid, Judgmental Religion Offered … More Orthodoxy

By Daniel Schultz

…rches that demand orthodoxy—another word for holiness—are the ones that do best. That’s even true! Conservative churches do fare better these days than liberal ones, though the sociologists tell me that’s mostly the result of their later adoption of birth control. The cultural trends are the cultural trends, even if they do take longer to catch up with some groups than others. It makes a certain surface amount of sense, then, that Shrum would argu…

A person holding a sign that says "If you're not angry then you're not listening."

Can Rage Fuel the Struggle for Justice? A Roundtable

By Religion Dispatches

…he American Political Science Association’s 2020 Ralph J. Bunche Award for best scholarly work exploring ethnic and cultural pluralism, and co-winner of the award for best book on race and ethnic politics. Myisha Cherry: Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, Myisha is also the Director of the Emotion and Society Lab. Her research is primarily concerned with the role of emotions and attitudes in public life….

Welcoming the Stranger: Sister Simone Campbell of Nuns on the Bus Speaks Out on DACA

By Kaya Oakes

…ical divide. ______ Kaya Oakes: Immigration reform is complex. What is the best way for those of us who support DACA to organize and change the system? Sister Simone Campbell: That’s the $64,000 question. If we’re supportive of young people who were brought to the U.S. as children and only principally know the U.S. as their home, and if we believe they add to our community, [then we need] to speak up for them and say that we as a nation are better…

Aliens, Nanobots, & Microbes: The Science of Secular Apocalypse

By Michael Schulson

…o had kids. A lot of them are very open to debate. And so we went out on a number of occasions and had two or three drinks and talked about the ethics of having a kid. There are legitimate questions to be asked, just at an existential level, about whether it’s right to bring something into the world that will suffer—and also experience pleasure—but will suffer and eventually perish. Let’s imagine the best world we can imagine. Is it right to bring…

A Victory for Conservatives in Revised AP History Curriculum

By Peter Laarman

…kewise be quite useful to keep Americans thinking that God still loves us best despite the daily evidence of falling fortunes. I should be clear that I think the admirable aspects of the white American story should certainly be taught. In my youth I taught an AP class in American literature in relation to 19th century American history. Were I teaching that same class today, I would have no difficulty inviting my students to think of the consti…

Can a Progressive Atheist Defeat the Democrats’ “Family” Man in NC?

By Sarah Jaffe

…11th District from a self-proclaimed progressive Democrat who is probably best known for being an atheist city councilman in a state that still requires government officials to believe in “Almighty God.” And if Shuler can fend off a primary challenge, he may still lose the support of his right flank to a newly-drawn district that’s even more conservative than before. The incumbent’s primary challenger, Cecil Bothwell, actually prefers the term “n…

Will Religion Finally Give Peace a Chance? Rising to the Challenge of Nonviolence as Armageddon Looms

By Peter Laarman

…forward, where negative campaigns often win, and where the sports we like best involve hard brutal contact. All of this is to say that there will be no saving turn toward a culture of nonviolence without also acknowledging and changing the violence we carry within. Then comes yet another step. Even when we stop ourselves from openly demonizing, we are still a long way from any kind of productive exchange. And that’s partly because it is still so…

The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

By Neil Ellingson

…with a late-night walk through the woods behind my parents’ house, and the best way I’ve found to describe that inaugural experience was that the trees looked “more real than before.” When I tried to explain this—and the sense that everything felt more real, including my self—to my college girlfriend, she looked at me with the same scrunched, doubting brow my friends had on that canoe trip years before. And then a strange thing happened. After som…

Blame Muscular Christianity for Driscoll Fiasco

By Hollis Phelps

…failure. Hence, in order to steer things back in the right direction, the best course of action is one of rebuke and, ultimately, removal, which is the course taken by Acts 29 and now Mars Hill Church—just as his critics have wanted. There’s of course something to that line of thought, but it seems too easy. Specifically, it puts all the focus on Driscoll and ignores the culture that produced him in the first place. Partly through the shrewd use…