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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…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…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 had always been a very pious child, and my faith became about service to others and seeing everyone as a chil…

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

By Spencer Dew

…ideals are used to make meaning of the project of the state. The nation becomes a community by becoming a set of ideals. Ideals are not the same as policy proposals, and they are certainly not synonymous with history. This was Miller’s first mistake, turning condescendingly pedantic (not a much-loved trait in America) and lecturing Acosta on what Acosta—and, according to Acosta, a great many Americans—believe. History was rallied to counter faith…

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…

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

By Michael Schulson

…terms.” In this view, theology is a kind of pluralistic discussion that welcomes all kinds of premises and belief commitments as it tackles shared questions. It’s not just haggling over dogma, or defining the nature of God. I asked Sheehan why, if NASA wanted to address certain big questions about astrobiology and society, they should turn to theologians, instead of asking philosophers or sociologists or religious studies scholars to come up with…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…y the majority of Christians are pro-LGBTQ. Anecdotally, since my book has come out a number of pastors and Christian leaders of major evangelical organizations have reached out to me because this movement has prompted them to become LGBTQ-affirming and they are grappling with how to live out their convictions in a community so divided on this subject. We’re on the brink of something big that could change everything. Of all the individuals conside…

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

…belts. Gay Nigerians say since the law was passed this kind of abuse has become common, and not just by vigilantes. BRIAN IFENNA: They beat me. They would hit me with a gun on my body. One of them wanted to take a plywood to put on my ass because he said I should lie down. NICK SCHIFRIN: Brian Ifenna says police officers picked him off the street and beat him inside this police station. BRIAN IFENNA: The law has given them the right to do what the…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…ensions between dogmatists on one or both sides. Or it could refer to some combination of both. Asked whether science and religion are, “often in conflict” or, “mostly compatible,” the poll participant has to collapse any such nuances and pigeonhole their beliefs into one side of a binary. It’s important to remember that Pew is measuring quick and narrow responses, not steadfast beliefs. The takeaway of their survey should not be that 59% of Ameri…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…centage points since 2007.” But what CNN really meant was “When asked by a complete stranger, over the phone, to define their spiritual lives in a single phrase, one-third of those adults who responded to this poll (response rate: one in ten), and who fall within an arbitrarily-defined generational frame, declined to tell the aforementioned complete stranger that they were affiliated with any specific religious group.” These are not equivalent sta…

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

By Michael Schulson

…, speculating, and damn, those kids are all doing x, y, and z on their cellphones, and it’s an outrage! Pew’s study of cellphone etiquette gives us one way to begin digging into a much larger set of questions: which norms do we, and should we, place around the use of digital tools? When are these opinions just personal preferences, and when do they take on a more explicit ethical dimension? When should we enforce them? Part of the problem is that…