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Trans Talmud: Could a 1,500-Year-Old Book Have Any Relevance to The Struggle for Trans Equality and Liberation?

By Shane Burley

…he conversation. The Talmud also has some terrible things to say sometimes about women, about sex between men, about genital “damage.” It says terrible things and I don’t want to skate over those by claiming it’s redemptive. Part of what’s happening in these transphobic pieces of legislation is that Christian hegemony is re-interpreting the texts that both Jews and Christians cite and using them to make a claim about the religious backing of the b…

Simon Critchley, Atheist Religious Thinker on Utopia & the Fiction of Faith

By Beatrice Marovich

…ithless” tag mostly there for poetic effect? Because, I mean, this book is about faith: about developing a certain kind of faith, or a certain way of looking at faith, or understanding faith. It’s not even a book about atheism, really. It’s true. I mean, it’s about faith. But a non-theistic faith, right? So, a faith that’s not underpinned by any metaphysical entity, like God. It’s a faith that exists through its declaration. My previous book, Inf…

What We Need to Understand is that Fascism is Intersectional and Erotic—’Thy Rod is Thy Gun,’ With a Hip-Thrust

By Annika Brockschmidt

…intended to get listeners high on the ecstasy of fascism. Can you tell us about that? So, Pastor Hank is talking about this church as a militia. Like more and more churches around the States, they don’t just support guns, they have guns. (At the Church of Glad Tidings in Yuba City, California, Tuesday night is militia-recruiting night.) Lord of Hosts in Omaha, Nebraska. No fringe church; nice suburban megachurch. This is a diverse church and the…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…ests, following a report from the American Academy of Political and Social Science, that “money for polls about religion would be better spent on a fewer high-quality polls than on more frequent low-quality polls.” The results won’t be flashier. But the first goal of research, and the goal of journalism, should not be to produce generalizations. It should be, foremost, to chronicle the complexities and weirdnesses of life. And, only then, to start…

On Religion, Abortion, and Politics: Dr. George Tiller’s Christian Ethics

By Ed Knudson

…, placing himself in the camp of fundamentalists and others who try to use science to prove biblical or theological claims. Biology itself, as a science, cannot determine when God acts. One can believe and understand the whole process as part of God’s creative activity, but there is no absolute scientific method by which to make the claim that everything centers on conception as the point that God uniquely acts to create a human being deserving of…

Don’t Blame Secularism: Reading Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion

By Jeffrey Feldman

…apter about it in a book. Maybe we even took a test. But then we just went about our business. The basics about Central Asia are kept in an educational black box, today, similar to the one that contained knowledge of the Soviet Union from the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And most Americans—be they schoolchildren, teachers, or journalists—do not open the box. They do not even know the box exists. As Rubin’s analysis shows us, we woul…

The Evolution of Religion, According to Darwin

By Elizabeth Drescher

…end, the well-known skeptic George Romanes, continues the dialogue between science and religion, faith and reason after Darwin’s death. You’ve discovered a new manuscript of the eulogy poems that had been out of circulation for a hundred years. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Consider the situation. Romanes was a religious skeptic and a preeminent evolutionist in Darwin’s inner circle. Given this, it was quite a surprise to uncover the orig…

Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…e secular and spiritual. I don’t think there’s such a big conflict between science and spirituality. The point of conflict would be presenting competing understandings; even within science you have competing theories. As the book shows, religion is extremely broad and so is spirituality. It’s not just one thing. I’m writing as a psychologist, and 90 percent of psychologists believe that religion is about the fear of death. Other than that they hav…

A Dismayed Democrat Reads the Bible

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…stians, a major task is consciousness raising within our own congregations about the Bible. Not only about what it is, but also about the idea that God is passionate about our liberation from oppressive systems. Part of the scandal of American Christianity is that statistically the U.S. is the most Christian country in the world, and yet as a country we have the greatest income inequality in the world. And as a country we are uncritically committe…

Evangelical “Sexual Purity” Is Not About Sex—It’s About Power

By Sara J. Moslener

…for readers? Sexual purity movements, past and present, are not ultimately about promoting a biblical view of sexuality. They are about explaining large-scale culture crises (e.g. Anglo-Saxon decline, the Cold War, changing gender roles and sexual mores) and providing a formula for overcoming those crises. Today’s movement is laden with a therapeutic rhetoric that presents these choices as the best choices for those who seek to conform their behav…