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What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

By Daniel Wise

…canvas on which people paint their religious worldviews using the unique tools their culture provides them. I’m not the first to suggest a culture’s hauntings reflect its religious milieu. Psychologist Frank T. McAndrew has argued that, for example, medieval European Christian, or contemporary Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, afterlife and spirit beliefs affect how these societies portray and interpret hauntings. I’m as interested as anyone in whethe…

Yes, It Can Be Hard to Be an Atheist in America; Now We Have the Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…n central Indiana and Colorado Springs, where I was sent to evangelical schools, his attitude both bemused and concerned me. The disconnect just serves to illustrate that how one answers this question may vary wildly depending on where one sits—in some cases quite literally. According to a new report from American Atheists* called Reality Check: Being Nonreligious in America, those living in “very religious” communities reported substantially more…

The Lady Vanishes: Trump’s Communications Team Tries to Topple a Monument

By Spencer Dew

…tly released transcripts of phone calls with Mexico and Australia, is all too apparent as a dominant and guiding focus) or a problem with those picked to actually “communicate” on behalf of the White House (from a Press Secretary who hid “among” bushes and banned cameras from press conferences to a Director of Communications who, in the early and yet also late days of his short-lived job accused one upper administration official of psychological p…

Are You There God? It’s Me, Donald: A President at Prayer

By Peter Laarman

…orrow, which is really more Mike Pence’s crowd than mine. They’ve been so good to me. But boy, they love Mike, this crowd. I looked at the speech Steve gave me. I’m definitely gonna use this line: “I have met amazing people whose words of worship and encouragement have been a constant source of strength.” That’s a good one. So smart. They do worship me. You saw those crowds at the inauguration? What a flock, right? You had a great view, I bet, the…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…million to the Center of Theological Inquiry, an independent institution “rooted in Christian theology.” The grant supports an initiative to study “the societal implications of astrobiology.” Surprisingly, it took more than a year for anyone to complain. The potential issue here is obvious: NASA is a government agency. The Center of Theological Inquiry is, well, a center of theological inquiry—an institution that seemingly has a religious, and spe…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

Did I really need to learn How To Be Here, urgently, right now? The book’s publisher had sent me not one advance reading copy, but three. A sign from the universe? I decided to read the book to find out. Or rather, to experience the book. Because that’s the one word that is associated with the work of Rob Bell, a “contemporary Christian” thinker who is at once renegade and establishment. Whether lectures or workshops or books, it’s all part of th…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

Journalist Deborah Jian Lee is a few months into a book tour for Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women & Queer Christians Are Reclaiming Evangelicalism. So far, Lee has been approached by non-Christians, newly eager to learn more about the progressive evangelical movement, by young readers like the queer Christian who found a path to acceptance by reading the book with his mother, and by other women of color, who have thanked her for address…

Religious Hostility to Gay Nigerians; The Pope’s Visit To Africa; Ireland’s Religious Schools Can’t Discriminate Against Gays; Orthodox Church in Georgia Leads Anti-Gay Forces; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…They would hit me with a gun on my body. One of them wanted to take a plywood to put on my ass because he said I should lie down. NICK SCHIFRIN: Brian Ifenna says police officers picked him off the street and beat him inside this police station. BRIAN IFENNA: The law has given them the right to do what they want to do to anyone who is an LGBT person. Schifrin says things are even worse for LGBT people who live in one of Nigeria’s Muslim communiti…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

To get good answers, you have to ask good questions. “Generally, do you think science and religion are often in conflict?” is not a very helpful question. It’s vague from start to finish. Religion could refer to the beliefs and practices of evangelical Protestants, Jesuits, secular Jews, or Theravada Buddhists—or even some imagined mashup of all global faiths. Science is fuzzy, too. It refers to a wide range of disciplines (e.g. astronomy, botany…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…are also misleading us, Wuthnow argues in his timely, obscenity-free new book, Inventing American Religion. Wuthnow, a sociologist of religion whose work has informed a generation of scholarship, examines how polling has shaped perceptions of religion in the United States over the past century. And he argues, convincingly, that pollsters and journalists need to be more honest about what these studies can, and cannot, tell us. It’s a shame, honest…