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Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…c of both the religion she left (Islam) and the community it projects (Arab-African-Asian Muslim nations). Ghosh and Hirsi Ali focus on the thin line between hatred and defamation, but while Ghosh finds blame on both sides, Hirsi Ali sees fault only with the Muslim protesters. She begins and ends with Rushdie, the victim of Khomeini’s fatwa in 1989 for his satirical novel, The Satanic Verses. Ghosh, for his part, cites not just Rushdie but several…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…nd protests against police brutality. Rescuing Jesus follows the conformist-skeptic-radical arc because over the course of all of my interviews, this was the most common trajectory most of progressive evangelicals had followed. I thought it was important to show this in intimate detail because it helps answer important questions. What are the greatest obstacles in disentangling from the Religious Right? How do people change? What are the consequen…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…addition, Reality Check takes care to note disparate outcomes among African-American, Latinx, ex-Muslim, and LGBTQ respondents, the intersections of whose racial, ethnic, sexuality, and gender identities can affect their experiences as nonreligious Americans. After reading Reality Check, I recently decided to test the waters on how the politically engaged, broadly progressive public might relate to the representation of nonreligious Americans as a…

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

By Michael Schulson

…t of cultural criticism about internet and cellphone use, and also reams of hard data, there’s not as much ethnographic work. There’s not that much in-depth, person-to-person reporting, either. Survey questions are good to have. But sometimes you have to dig deeper….

Education, Texas-Style

By Lauri Lebo

…ading intellectual forces of democracy is not just being literal and simple-minded. That’s Orwellian propaganda. But this short-sighted maneuver could actually backfire. By downgrading Jefferson’s writings, they’re forgetting a document that is key to their whole argument that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. The Declaration of Independence has become a key document for far-right Christian conservatives of late. There has been…

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

By Peter Laarman

…nson Amendment that currently bars tax-favored congregations (and other non-for-profit 501c3 organizations) from engaging in overt political activity. Trump appeared to be unaware of Mr. Jefferson’s insistence on a “wall of separation” between church and state. One imagines that President Trump might actually have had a go at prayer on the eve of yesterday’s breakfast appearance. What follows is an imaginative reconstruction. ___________ Dear Fath…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…state, where 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 Va…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…ils about American attitudes towards GMOs, nuclear power, and other science-and-society issues. But while they may offer rough estimates of public opinion, these results are far from objective or clean. Beneath the colorful surface of each graph lie a series of filters, amplifiers, and cultural biases that mediate any representation of public opinion. Digging in The Cubit has recently discussed, at length, the inherent limitations of polls and sur…

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

…ines when the Russian foreign ministry announced it was pulling out of a 21-year-old exchange program because the student had not returned to Russia when he was scheduled to. Russian officials told state-run media that the child had been “seduced” by a “pair of old homosexuals” while in the U.S., and had sought asylum because of his “non-traditional sexual orientation.” On Saturday, the New York Times reported that the fact that the boy “chose not…

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…