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Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

LDS Church Launches New Website Calling for Greater Openness and Understanding on LGBT Issues

By Joanna Brooks

When he visited mormonsandgays.org shortly after its official launch yesterday morning, Jayce Cox cried. There at the new LDS Church-owned website, Cox, a gay Mormon man with six generations of family history in the LDS faith, saw video messages from top-ranking Church leaders and rank-and-file gay Mormons calling explicitly for greater understanding, openness, and dialogue around LGBT issues and an end to the rejection of gay family members, con…

Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…compassion still to be done and we will be addressing this need in our Web site in the New Year. Each week there will be more issues to discuss, refinements and questions answered, and I hope to write a piece weekly about such topics as the compassionate interpretation of scripture, the importance of acquiring accurate information about other people, and what it means to “love” our enemies. There has been a lot of interest in the Charter. One of t…

Are Evangelicals Suffering From Buyer’s Remorse with Obama?

By Bill Berkowitz

…service and hundreds of exclusive interviews with policymakers, government officials, academics and service members, the book shows the cruel and unaffordable costs of the current gay ban,” according to the book’s Web site. See here for Frank’s friendly visit last week with John Stewart on The Daily Show. ++++++++++ RD Tidbits Coral Ridge Ministries’ New Pastor: In mid-March, the members of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (founded by the late D. J…

Dialogue or Demonization? Where Gays are Concerned, Focus on the Family Wants it Both Ways

By Cody J. Sanders

…y has tempered their language about LGBT persons on the Day of Dialogue website, it only takes three clicks of the mouse to navigate directly from the Day of Dialogue site to the ADF “Marriage and the Family” page quoted above. This certainly doesn’t seem to be language conducive to genuine dialogue and does little to increase the credibility of the organizer’s newly visible anti-bullying stance. But it begs another question: What exactly are we t…

Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience

By Rachel Wagner

…ended the lives of more than 70 people. According to the Eddo Stern’s Web site, gamers “enter the mind and form of a resurrected David Koresh,” and enter the game’s network “as a Koresh [who] must defend the Branch Davidian compound against internal intrigue, skeptical civilians, rival Koresh, and the inexorable advance of government agents” [my italics]. Within the plastic mask, players are “bombarded with a soundstream of government ‘psy-ops,’…

Clarion Fund Claims Times Square Bombing Attempt Proof of “Coordinated Jihad Against Western Values”

By Sarah Posner

…rious threat — that of Islamism — and makes it into a cartoon.” At the web site Jews On First, which follows the religious right, a number of analysts contributed to Rebutting Obsession, which as the name suggests, cuts through the film’s ahistorical, conspiratorial, and propagandistic claims. Writing around the same time in the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz described the Clarion Fund as: a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure group…

Pat Robertson’s Women Warriors Leading Spiritual Warfare In Zimbabwe

By Sarah Posner

…ential material,” said Mpofu. “Oh yeah,” echoes Bourland. “In my heart, I just begin to pray, God, let this woman rise to this place that you want her to go,” said Mpofu. “Number one, she’s a Christian. Number two, she’s a woman.” Watch a short video montage of the conference here. —Ed….

Five Social Media Trends that are Reshaping Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…the thousands ignored each year. 4. Curate as Curator As social networking sites grow as prime destinations for day-to-day distraction (with more than half of all adults in the U.S. visiting social networking sites “for no particular reason,” according to a recent survey), engaging content will have increasing significance. It’s important to remember that “engaging” doesn’t mean ‘shiny’ or ‘loud.’ Rather, it means content that appeals to or produc…