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Fasting and Faithy Friends of Convenience

By Sarah Posner

…and embrace—Glenn Beck be damned—social justice religion, right? That a prominent liberal Washington insider and social justice-minded Catholic like Dionne has already essentially conceded that there’s little doubt the president will cave to political expediency rather than defend the Democratic-religious alliance demonstrates just how fragile—or shall I say phony? or non-existent?—it really is. I’ve always doubted that religious support for Obama…

Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

By Patricia Miller

…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…

‘Religious Freedom’ Rally Sets Stage for 1st Amendment Collision

By Sarah Posner

…ties lost challenges to similar policies in state courts in California and New York, several Catholic and evangelical universities have sued HHS in federal courts around the country, charging that the contraception coverage requirement violates their religious freedom. While a federal court has yet to rule on the mandate, a ruling issued late Friday night demonstrates how the claim of infringement of religious freedom undermines the First Amendmen…

The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required

By Kelly J. Murphy

…us is no more than a platitude. Pick your apocalypse: zombie apocalypse, any number of post-apocalyptic worlds that crowd our television screens, movie theaters, and book stores, or, perhaps more traditionally, the apocalypse associated with the Second Coming. Think of the 2011 Family Radio Billboards: “He is Coming Again! May 21, 2011.” Or the tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker: Jesus is Coming, Look Busy. During the last week of January 2015, polic…

Raelians’ “Clitoraid” Met With Suspicion in Burkina Faso

By Joseph Laycock

…cessfully produced a human clone named Eve. When Clonaid refused to offer any evidence of their accomplishment, however, the claim was dismissed as a hoax. The media grew hostile toward Raelianism and Clonaid and in 2003 sealed documents suggested that Clonaid existed in name only and had no actual assets. 2003 was also the year that Rael became interested in female circumcision while on a speaking tour in Western Africa. (Raelians have been makin…

“Real” Evangelicals Don’t Support Trump? Not So Fast…

By Neil J. Young

…e larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trump evangelicals’ main argument about the suspect…

Elaine Howard Ecklund Wants to Dispel Myths Surrounding Religious Resistance to Science

By Sammy Feldblum

…climate care and climate change in these faith communities are changing. That would be an awesome study. My sense is that after big storm events, each time a big city gets hit, that city becomes more attuned to climate change. That certainly seemed to be the case in New York, with Sandy. I think of that as being the case in New Orleans as well. Well, we have noticed the city looking to Rice University for expert help: on how should we do our levee…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…h, Mr. Perkins—you’re one of them. I’m not saying that because I believe Tony Perkins should be affirming LGBT politics or theology. That is not the case. Until Jesus comes back there will always be an ‘opposite’ or an ‘other.’ What I am saying is that Tony Perkins is himself a bully because his engagement with this topic consists of getting as many people as he can to support him against someone else’s son, daughter, mother, father, aunt, uncle—a…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…England Protestants “of that kind which is most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion” with a religion amounting to “a refinement of the principle of resistance.” What’s most remarkable about the American Revolution is how a rebellion that had passionate religion at its heart was able, eventually, to give us total freedom of religion, including freedom from religion for those whom we might well regard as the ultimate Dissenters. A…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…hite voters in the Rust Belt. While Trump clearly won these voters, as the New York Times noted, “Trump won his biggest margins among middle-income white voters.” Many of these middle-income white voters are Catholics in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin that swung heavily, and unexpectedly, toward Trump. And among these voters, who aren’t necessarily economically struggling the same way that blue-collar voters are, the Afford…