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Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…at the birth of Jesus was not immaculate, that he was instead conceived by ordinary human means, outside Jewish law and beyond the awareness or participation of Mary’s lawful husband? Does it matter if Hitler is proclaimed a god, and Jesus a bastard? The self-appointed custodian of limitless freedom of speech would say: No. Take the poison with the perfume. It may hurt, but restricting it or any form of insult is worse. It undermines the basis of…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

…st his ear while my pastor, who had called him from the pulpit, pointed a cordless phone toward the congregation; we all wept and sang him love songs as he lay dying. These are uniquely evangelical experiences that shaped me, that will always be a part of me. I still long for this kind of community—the kind that journeys together through all the peaks and valleys of life. This is my long way of saying that, even though I’m no longer evangelical, e…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…ll observes, this “can sometimes obfuscate the needs of our community.” According to Reality Check, “Participants’ analysis of community religiosity aligned well with geographic expectations.” In other words, regions you’d expect to be highly religious were reported by participants to be so. In addition, “While nonreligious beliefs may be casually accepted in states like California and Vermont, nonreligious people living in states like Mississippi…

Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…t yourself, trust me: people in the pews are constantly whipping out their phones in order to look up Bible passages, take notes during sermons, and, perhaps, do other things. Bible apps like YouVersion, which claims close to 200 million downloads, are now a common way to find, say, Matthew 7:5 quickly, instead of having to rifle through a pulp-and-glue book. It’s possible that some people are hypocrites about phone use in church (cf. Matthew 7:5)…

Education, Texas-Style

By Lauri Lebo

…lutions in the late 18th century and 19th century. (They also cut out the word “Enlightenment.”) Of course, Jefferson, a deist who didn’t have much use for Christianity and who coined the term “separation of church and state,” creates a problem for those who argue the founding fathers wanted American to be a “Christian nation.” I’ve spoken to board member Don McLeroy quite a few times on the phone and he genuinely seems like someone who wants to b…

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

By Peter Laarman

…amous Christian in the world.” He told me that last week in a great, great phone call. Oh, and Fred Douglass. I need to get his input, too. Just this morning I told them, the great African Americans who supported me completely, what an amazing job Fred is doing, being recognized more and more. They loved it. They love me. My speech was a the biggest success in the history of black people. The media lied about it, of course. They said I didn’t know…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…the decision will be made. We are participating in a Catholic-to-Catholic phone bank that Washington United for Marriage has set up on Wednesday nights and we assist with the larger phone bank at the Jewish synagogue downtown. A great deal of our work is communicating with Catholics on our email list and Facebook. As a Catholic, how does your faith shape your views on marriage for LGBT people? My faith blossomed in the 1960s after Vatican II. I h…

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…

Vatican Considers ‘Disordered’ Language; HBO Doc on LGBT Persecution in Russia; Nigerian Bishop Shifts on Anti-Gay Law; Arson at ‘Open Mosque’ in South Africa; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…at some Catholics have been asking for language such as “instrinsically disordered” and “objective disorder” to stop being used to refer to gay people. Writes Terence Weldon at Queering The Church: “For lesbian and gay people, this is nothing new, but it is something that the bishops needed to hear. Indeed, even some of those who are already aware of the harmful effects and warning against them, may not realize the depth of the damage that is done…

My Lowest Point

By Amina Wadud

…ace. We’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed…