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Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…f the individuals he interviewed would rate more than a “C” in my fantasy class either.) The filmmakers furthermore missed the opportunity to speak with others who don’t have such dogmatic assertions about their religiousness, as Jennifer Hahn suggested in these pages last week. In the end, beyond showing contempt for and ignorance about the full dimensions of religion, Maher shows that he’s actually one of those beings who most likely will be out…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…ce. The latest to pile on is the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Last Wednesday, issues of the magazine hit newsstands with a front cover showing an Orthodox Jew pushing a turbaned figure in a wheelchair with several caricatures of the Prophet on its inside pages, including some of him naked. In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera last Friday, the editor defended his decision to publish these cartoons arguing that the problem is the i…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…et of Americans respond to leading questions, posed by strangers, over the phone. But it’s science! Public opinion polling ends up existing in a strange gray space between science and journalism. A Pew report is definitively not a scientific paper: its goal is to serve media outlets, not to advance a body of academic inquiry. It’s not peer-reviewed. Its methods lack the scope and rigor of a formal social science study. That doesn’t make these repo…

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

By Daniel Wise

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…saulted over their unbelief, although for African-American respondents the number is 2.5%. Meanwhile, 12% of respondents experienced threats of violence, and 2.5% experienced vandalism (14.2% and 3.2%, respectively, for Latinx respondents). None of these facts make the experience of “coming out” as nonreligious the same as coming out as LGBTQ, but they do nonetheless show that disclosing one’s nonreligious identity can be fraught and risky dependi…

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

By Spencer Dew

…her “everybody’s gal.” In wartimes she’s carried a sword, placed an urgent phone call for financial help, and even scolded her citizenry. As a mascot for our country, she’s been given the face of a skull on the streets of Tehran and been beheaded by Trump in a famous Der Spiegel cover from earlier this year. In the religious and cultural imagination of America, she’s been denounced as a demonic idol, revered as a Wiccan goddess, reimagined as a Ch…

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

By Peter Laarman

…e. The media lied about it, of course. They said I didn’t know Douglass. They just can’t stop lying. Oh, gotta go, that’s my man Douglass on the phone right now. #amen #maga…

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

By Michael Schulson

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…

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

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…ple have told him “it’s the best church I’ve ever been to.”) If there’s a clash between his insistence that anybody can do this being-here thing, and the distinctly celebrity-culture incidents he uses to prove that, Rob Bell isn’t interested in pointing it out. That’s just his life, his material. And of course people do treat Bell like a celebrity. A man who said he drove to Durham from Columbus, Ohio, was starting an online ministry known as “Rad…