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Are Women “Secondary” in Catholic Church?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…h is out of touch, and as the religiously unaffiliated continue to grow in number, how women—the majority of active church-goers—experience the church is hardly a secondary concern. Gendered church language seems as good a place to start as any. The liturgies of most churches are lousy with sexist godtalk. This is the case well beyond the limited texts in which, arguably, tradition and aesthetics make make gender changes difficult. First on the li…

I’d Rather Go Back to Yemen than Face NYPD

By Hussein Rashid

…mes. Paired with the assertion in the NYPD’s report, Radicalization in the West, that one of the markers of a potential terrorist is that s/he does not drink alcohol, and you have the premises for police overreach. It’s difficult to imagine the NYPD asserting that Catholics who fast during Lent are potential terrorists, the way it suggests that Muslims who fast during Ramadan are. The great unspoken folly of the radicalization report is that it ap…

By the Numbers: Most Say No Rejoicing in Bin Laden’s Death

By The Editors

…k celebration of anyone’s death is justified—no matter how villainous the person. Other findings of note: Catholics are least likely to support the use of torture, more than 8 in 10 Americans believe that bin Laden distorted the teachings of Islam in his campaign to defeat the west, and nearly half of the “nones” or religiously unaffiliated, believe that bin Laden will be punished in hell. And finally, Tea Party members—more than Republicans in ge…

Evangelical Star Rob Bell Comes Out For Marriage Equality

By Nicole Greenfield

…gelical superstar and, until recently, pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, a West Michigan megachurch he founded in 1999. Speaking yesterday at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, he officially came out in support of marriage equality. “I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs—I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are,” Bell continued. This declaration is the latest step in Bell’s “search…

10 Years Later: An American Muslim Looks Back at Iraq

By Haroon Moghul

…mperors of Rome, because, we should remember, it is not only the Christian West that claims the mantle of Greece and Rome. There have been many different Romes. I have no way of conceiving what it must be like to be at war, under sanction, threatened with explosions, ethnically cleansed, chemically gassed, and so on and so forth, for a length of time long as I have been alive. (I was born when Iraq went to war with Iran.) As it turned out, I was i…

Islam, Essential to America?

By Scott Korb

…specific audience in mind when writing? I come from a small town in the Midwest, where “Moslem” is still the preferred pronunciation. The people from my hometown were one specific audience. They represent a lot of America. I wrote for the students I teach, who are looking for ways to tell new and interesting stories about religion in this country. And I wrote for the people I wrote about; they invited me into their community and I wanted to do the…

American Indians Irate over Bin Laden Code Name “Geronimo”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…ongest war in human history, the war against the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Most famously, the military has long encouraged paratrooper trainees to call out his name when they jump out of airplanes instead of counting to three before pulling the ripcord. The reaction of the US military to criticism was to say that Geronimo was “randomly chosen,” but it isn’t difficult to imagine the top brass associating the pursuit of bin Laden…

Bryan Fischer’s and the GOP’s Special Christian First Amendment

By Sarah Posner

…none of these Republicans have any compunction from sidling up to the microphone of Fischer’s radio show. As one of the former AFA employees, Allie Martin, told me last year, speaking of some of his former co-workers, “They have bought into this idea of Americanized Christianity, that tells them God has blessed them, and evidence of that is their stuff and comfort.” Outsiders, or perceived outsiders, threaten that. While anti-Muslim bigotry has be…

An Agnostic Biography of the Prophet Muhammad

By Lesley Hazleton

…se I was also impelled by a certain dismay at how little most of us in the West know about Muhammad, especially when Islam is so often in the headlines and there are so many competing claims to “the truth about Islam.” This one man radically changed his world—indeed he’s still changing ours—so it seemed to me vitally important that we be able to get beyond stereotypes and see who he really was. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about Muh…

Mourning a Goddess: Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

By Susan Henking

…erhaps beyond). The many jokes about her many marriages. And if she could see the poignant Elizabeth Taylor shrine at her “favorite gay bar in West Hollywood” perhaps she would smile. We will mourn her….