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Is the Bible Too Holy to Be Tennessee’s State Book?

By Adam Shapiro

…der later in the year and adopted it into their state symbology.) In 2014, South Carolina adopted the Columbian mammoth as state fossil, but only after the defeat of an amendment that would have insisted that the mammoth was created on the Biblical sixth day. Unlike the obvious overreach of the creationist mammoth amendment, the language of HB615 appears to go out of its way to remain neutral on the question of whether the Bible is true. The bill…

‘Rising Global Tide’ Of Anti-Gay Crackdowns; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…xecutive director, Sibongile Ndashe, described by Human Rights Watch as “a South African feminist lawyer.” The government also announced it had “suspended the business” of CHESA. From Pink News: In Tanzania, male homosexual sex carries a sentence anywhere between 30 years and life in prison. Their Colonial-era penal code criminalises anyone who “has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature.” Earlier this year, Tanzania stopped he…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…

Win For ‘Natural Family’ Crowd at UN Human Rights Council…

By Peter Montgomery

…tion, such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. America, South Africa, South Korea and 11 European countries (including Britain, France and Germany) voted against, on grounds that it put too much emphasis on traditional family structures. South Africa unsuccessfully tried to insert language that took account of same-sex marriages and other non-traditional arrangements. Efforts by Western delegations to include the point that family structures…

Six Overlooked Gems from the Future of World Religions Report

By Timothy King

…3.2 million new adherents and “folk religions” (these tend to be small in number and tied to a particular people group or tribe) are likely to see gains of 2.6 million during the same time period. Such numbers are miniscule compared to the projected 61.5 million expected to switch into the “unaffiliated” category by 2050, nevertheless the 197% projected growth rate should turn more than a few heads. Something is causing people to be attracted to…

The “Southern Cage”: How the Myth of the Redemptive Depression Keeps Blacks at the Margins

By Eric C. Miller

…d reinforced Jim Crow. How are we to evaluate the virtues and vices of the Southern churches with regard to race? Southerners adored Roosevelt. He won 96 percent of the vote in Mississippi in 1932! And white Southerners didn’t just embrace the New Deal—they helped create it. Ira Katznelson calls this the New Deal’s “Southern cage”: Roosevelt relied on the support of powerful Southern congressmen who crafted economically progressive but racially re…

Occupy Francis Lewis Boulevard

By Haroon Moghul

…e of the two of us is stalking the other. For those of you who don’t know, South Asians are always made incredibly uncomfortable by other South Asians, meaning they are made anxious whenever they are in proximity to other South Asians, and the anxiety level spikes to cardiac proportions if those South Asians are of the opposite gender. Nobody knows why this is, but it is a convincing argument against evolution, because if we all have this mutual a…

LGBT’s, Opponents Prep for Vatican Synod; UN Rights Council Adopts LGBT Resolution; Brazil’s Evangelicals Eye Presidency; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…from the proposal… LGBT advocates earlier this week expressed concern that South Africa would not support the latest resolution, but in the end the country backed it. Ambassador Abdul Samad Minty, who is South Africa’s permanent U.N. representative in Geneva, said after the vote that the resolution “is in sync with our national values shaped on our own history and experience of discrimination.” “This history and the struggle against all forms of d…

Ainslie Embree’s Gift to Religious Studies

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…rces of Indian Tradition, that became standard for courses in Hinduism and South Asian Islam. He also helped to establish the South Asian Institute, an early model for the new research field of South Asian Studies throughout the Western world. It is hard to imagine now how novel it was then, this idea of studying cultural regions, especially seemingly arcane ones like Asia. But Embree was a pioneer. He also forged new paths in the study of religio…

Christian Imperialism in Haiti? Missionaries, Theo-tourism, and the Invasion of the Global South

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…y the manner in which their ignorance is a destructive force in the global South. The current North American missionary wave—often in the guise of aid—is not new to the Caribbean and Latin America. The twentieth century is marked particularly by the increased presence of Protestant denominations in traditionally Roman Catholic countries. Haiti is no exception. These North American missionary groups, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, bring US cul…