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Exclusive: Columnist Jonathan Merritt on his Sudden Departure From Religion News Service

By Kaya Oakes

…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…

Spiritual McCarthyism and the Catholic Vote

By Bill Berkowitz

…ing, the status of Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council is unclear. (Phone calls to Obama headquarters were not returned.) However, the dust-up between the always vociferous Donohue and the Obama campaign was reminiscent of the battles that took place during the 2004 presidential campaign when a group of conservative Catholics and neoconservatives were joined by conservative Christian evangelicals in attacking the Catholic authenticity of th…

Google’s Benevolent Interfaith Big Tent

By Lucia Hulsether

…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…

Gay Marriage Supporters Rally People of Faith for Washington’s November Vote

By Nicole Neroulias

…ch of Christian denominations working with us now.” Discussions during the phone bank covered the Golden Rule, whether the Leviticus view of homosexuality as an abomination also extended to eating shrimp, and how civil marriage licenses are distinct from religious weddings. Most of the calls lasted mere seconds, with people not home or not interested. After an hour working the phones, Scott Holley, 33, cheerfully noted that he had become “unfazed…

The Pope in My Pocket; We Are All Dilettantes Now

By Michael A. Elliott

…or sell for under two dollars). And unlike the internet, the space of the iPhone feels not just private, but personal. Yes, the iPhone might be my means of connection with the world—it is, after all, a phone—but it is also my own little password-locked garden that I carry with me wherever I go. Moreover, I can remake the landscape with a few flicks of my fingers whenever I choose. As a result, the territory necessarily mixes the sacred and the pro…

Mormon Leader Affirms Doctrine on Marriage; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nd colleagues. Some victims were detained after being lured to meet in the city by the police, who were posing online as gay or transgender people looking for dates, the activist added. Many of those affected lived in rented apartments, which their landlords told them to vacate after the raids, the activist said. Some fled for Turkey or went to hide in other regions of Azerbaijan. Eurasianet also reported on the “rising” persecution of LGBT people…

Oscar Watch: Why Spike Jonze’s Her Is Not About Technology

By Daniel Pecchenino

…ia, Mormon ward, ashram, or some building owned by the Scientologists. The City of Angels was also home to one of the strangest and most important evangelists of the 20th century, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, a primitive radio god who faked her own kidnapping to cover up a tryst in Mexico. Given this history, the absence of religious landmarks is striking. It would have been easy enough to paste symbols of Los Angeles’s spiritual history into He…

Occupy’s Sacred Mob and the Politics of Vagrancy

By Vincent Gonzalez

…n and pressing them out. Around it, our camp fractures and rejoins, like a city of bridged boats. Recent analyses of religion in the 99% Movement tend to begin with a focus simply on pluralism, asking how diverse forms of religious transcendence—particularly in justice-minded congregations—have aligned themselves with the still-growing wave of Occupations. Muslims and Christians pray at their camps, and New Agers do yoga. When the Jewish festival…

What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…that Democrats need to get better at telling stories than at crunching the numbers, in this battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight fac…

Rent-Free Religion in New York’s Public Schools

By Katherine Stewart

…e large-scale organizations that successfully planted churches in multiple numbers of New York City’s public schools, and the numbers grew quickly. During the 2010-2011 school year, the Department of Education said 160 congregations were granted permits for worship services. The new churches valued not just the free real estate, but also the proximity to children and families, and the credibility provided by their new physical setting. Owing to th…