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Don’t Blame Black Voters: The Obama Non-Effect

By Jonathan L. Walton

…the deciding vote.” Even comedian John Stewart chimed in with a satirical cheap shot declaring that African-American celebration over President-Elect Obama amounted to, “Free at last, free at last—whoa, whoa, [referring to an image of two men holding hands]—where are you two going?” Tragicomic, indeed. I understand that emotions over the passing of Proposition 8 in California are high. Seeing as my household was among those that opposed the measu…

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

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…t next to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and other sort-of-atheists. (I’m talking the nerdy academic’s version of “fantasy football” here.) And I give them the assignment I always give to my eighteen-year-old students: come up with your own definition of religion, see if you can put it in a sentence, and then give some paragraphs of support to back it up. The assignment has no singular answer, of course; I’m looking for their a…

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

By Michael Schulson

…ries; physicist are discussing multiverses and other category-blurring edge-of-reality topics; biologists are creating ways to synthesize organisms and entirely rewrite the map of the human body. Like it or not, new research is going to force our society to confront questions that sound metaphysical, and to have new kinds of debates over the nature and extent of humanness. And, as always, questions of access will remain: who will get a place at th…

Religious Hostility to Gay Nigerians; The Pope’s Visit To Africa; Ireland’s Religious Schools Can’t Discriminate Against Gays; Orthodox Church in Georgia Leads Anti-Gay Forces; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…I’m living true to mine.” Brunei: US officials discuss human rights, death-to-gays penal code U.S. officials, including the ambassador to Brunei, discussed human rights issues with Bruneian officials at a November 30 meeting in London. The new penal code includes a death penalty for those convicted of sodomy. Northern Ireland: Legal challenge to marriage ban moves forward Two gay couples were granted permission for a judicial review of their chal…

Gay Marriage Opponents Running on Empty

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…n staffers who attended today’s rally reported: “I have hand-counted 29 non-NOM staffers attending the rally—about the same number that have attended every other event on this tour.” They were outnumbered by those who came in support of marriage equality. … about 95 marriage equality supporters marched in to the event to counter-protest NOM on a sidewalk across from the event. Impressive. Once again, NOM has been embarrassed on this tour, drawing…

Cloverfield: Sin & Redemption, with Monsters

By Gabriel Mckee

…e deserve it, this says—a theology of sin and divine retribution. The kaiju-as-divine-wrath theme is nowhere as clear as in Gamera 3: Awakening of Irys, possibly the genre’s best film since the original Godzilla. Early in this film Gamera, the giant fire-breathing turtle of the title, decides that humanity isn’t necessarily worth protecting. After all, his official title is “Guardian of the Universe,” and if humankind is going to harm the universe…

Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…bout all the love I’ve been taught my whole life?” For example, my eighteen-year-old son received a phone call from the bishop for an interview to set him on the road to preparing for his missionary service. So we are in the hall, and I’m telling him, “You need to call the bishop.” My son looks at me and says, “Mom, I can’t do this.” We talked over many things he was concerned about. One of them was that he has an openly gay teacher who, he told m…

A Tale of Religious Tolerance… On Reddit

By Joanna Piacenza

…ag” posted the picture under the Reddit tab “Funny,” hoping to get an elbow-in-the-side snickering reaction from the online community. But what happened next speaks volumes of Reddit contributors. Although many of the mostly white, liberal, and somewhat-educated young male audience showed their ignorance for diverse religious values, most bit back. Reddit peers verbally tore “european_douchebag” apart, castigating him for not only taking a creepy…

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

By Spencer Dew

…n a pre-dawn tweetstorm, more memorable than the Orwellian coinages of “alt-fact” and “post-truth,” the poem is unshakably associated with the statue on the public imagination. (If Miller were really interested in originalism, he might have noted, as the Smithsonian did a few years back, that the lady’s original design had her wearing a veil, as an Egyptian peasant woman, and her intended function was to serve as a lighthouse on the Suez). The poe…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…ehovah’s Witnesses describe themselves as born-again) rather than as margin-of-error ranges, normalized around a mean (had it taken that margin into account up-front, the Pew study would have reported that 16.8%-31.2% of Jehovah’s Witnesses believe they’re born again; somehow, that sounds less authoritative). It’s also important to recognize that these surveys exist in a careful reciprocity with media organizations. Unlike academic work, polls and…