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The Religious Right and the Tea Party on “Education Choice”

By Julie Ingersoll

…e open to anyone who wishes to attend, though there will be a limit on the number of schools (no more than ten in the next decade) and the number of students enrolled. Opponents see charter schools as quasi-privatized schools (and also fear that this is a first step toward further privatization). They see even these limited charter schools as a threat to funding for public education—especially in these difficult budget years where public education…

PCUSA’s Nod to “Traditional” Marriage Understandable, but Not Accurate

By William E. Smith

…Father Knows Best arrangement. It isn’t difficult to understand why the PCUSA 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…

Trump is a Nightmare, Sure, But Can He Actually Do Anything?

By Sunnivie Brydum

…tion’s assault on civil rights has largely been an attempted death by a thousand (regulatory) paper cuts, “what you have to do is oppose them by a thousand cuts,” Berry explained. “Make sure that you have plenty of people that comment during the public comment period; overwhelm [the relevant agencies] with comments. Then insist that, procedurally, they review them, which takes a long time. You just keep pushing the envelope… at the same time that…

Evangelical Pastor Argues for Full LGBT Inclusion: “I Think It’s Inevitable”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…you to write this book? I had been doing a rethink on this question for a number of years and my convictions had changed but I didn’t know how to process it in the congregation at that stage. I had processed it with the church board and pastoral staff and different leaders. I was doing a lectio divina when I got the idea to write a letter to my congregation. I didn’t want to have congregational meetings to talk about how to handle this because th…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…r her. At the same time, I sympathized with Muslimah Pride’s irritation at Western feminist arrogance, and felt somewhat ashamed. We are always so ready to pounce when non-Western women are threatened. Indeed, as scholar Lila Abu-Lughod points out, even Americans who are not feminists—often on religious grounds—seem ready to fight wars in the Middle East, ostensibly in order to “save” oppressed Muslim women. Moreover, I tend to agree with Muslimah…

The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…take it twice! So there!)—“might insist that correlation does not imply causation.” My statistically muddled insistence be damned, however, because Downey doubles down by arguing that “correlation does provide evidence in favor of causation, especially when we can eliminate alternative explanations.” Like pipers, for instance. What is missed, however, in the churning of this internet-killed-religion yarn is, first of all, that changes in complex…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…the sheer scale of the Second World War; and because of the unprecedented number of documents preserved in hundreds of archives and libraries across dozens of countries, this is obviously not the case. The second is that there’s little to no reality behind popular cultural representations of the Nazi supernatural. While many of these representations are exaggerated or erroneous, many others have some basis in reality. In the case of Hitler’s Mons…

The Suppression of Sin in Evangelical Abolitionism: The Wilberforce Problem

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…56 percent of which are women and girls. A smaller, but still considerable number are victims of sex trafficking—essentially, forced prostitution. With increasing frequency, reports of sex trafficking rings in major U.S. cities appear in the media. In major hubs like Houston and New York City, stories about charges and convictions of homegrown trafficking cells shed light on just how widespread domestic trafficking is. Just this week, the website…

How a Ruling for Masterpiece Cakeshop Could Embolden White Nationalists

By Sunnivie Brydum

…or even federal—protections aimed at combatting discrimination against any number of marginalized populations. “The cultural and political prominence of religious freedom as an American ideal draws people to it,” Wenger said. “The reason people appeal to it for all sorts of purposes is because it’s so culturally, politically, and legally powerful.” Indeed, as Wenger’s book documents in deep historical detail, the bedrock American principle has alr…

Census Reveals Gay People are Shockingly… Normal

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…. Even here in my own incredibly conservative state of South Carolina, the number of same-sex couples increased and a quarter of them are raising children. It’s those kinds of facts that have right-wing media like the Christian Post scratching their heads, with headlines like this that rival anything over at The Onion: “Gay Couples Spread in U.S., Behave Like Straight Couples” Um, yeah, well, duh. What exactly are gay couples supposed to act like?…