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The Abandoned Orphanage: Hillary Clinton’s Mother Teresa Moment

By Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce

…head Doug Coe’s introduction and the traditional presidential address by Barack Obama, was an interesting coda to her strange status as a longtime “friend” of the Family. Although much of the media coverage focused on Clinton’s and then President Obama’s condemnations of the anti-gay bill (leading religion scholar Mark Silk to suggest that Clinton’s role was damage control as the Family struggles to make the Uganda bill “go away”) Clinton’s speec…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…at they don’t like him at all. 29 percent of Americans believe President Obama to be an adherent of Islam, a religion that nearly one in three Iowa Republicans thinks should be illegal. (Perhaps because those Iowans took notice of this poll, the results of which seem to indicate that half of American Muslims support the imposition of sharia law, and nearly one-fifth justify violence as a means to this end.) Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surv…

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

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…ive recitation; that a Muslim can make the pilgrimage to Mecca, touch the Kaaba, and still realize that at its base it is, indeed, a meteorite and not a holy rock from God. Maher even goes so far as to claim that “Christians believe” they are drinking the blood of a man who lived 2000 years ago. But he never asks anyone if they believe that. It’s a straw man argument. Even if this theological idea of “transubstantiation” has been written into Cath…

Sex Abuse in the Catholic Church: When Adults are Victims

By Kathryn Joyce

…impede prosecution of abusive priests. As Catholic sex abuse scandals once again dominate headlines from Boston to Belgium, and even the fast-track canonization of Pope John Paul II is marred by questions of culpability, the role of the Catholic hierarchy in enabling clergy abuse seems indisputable, admitted even by die-hard church partisans like the Catholic League. But what’s less understood is how these same patterns persist in today’s Church,…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…I attended a panel discussion devoted to the religious basis for arguments against reform at the National Press Club in Washington DC entitled “Religious Perspectives on Immigration.” It was sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which bills itself as an independent nonpartisan think tank on the impact of immigration on the United States. The announcement of this panel caught my attention because none of the panelists seemed to rep…

Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…tlets were able to see possible symbolic references to, say, Abraham and Isaac, Jesus, or others. So, I’m left wondering, did the reviewers blink their eyes, or reach down for another bite of popcorn, at the images of a tattooed Jesus Christ on Randy’s back? Or the “Job” (pronounced with long “o”) inked into the skin of his middle finger? Or the white fleece vest he wears on his entrance into his final fight? A couple of reviewers did pick up on C…

Four Reasons Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Islamic

By Zaid Hassan

…much in flux. This writer believes, however, that whatever happens, the Mubarak Era is over. In the words of political scientist, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “If the societies we live in constrain us in the same way as gravity, there is still room for us to look beyond the horizon. A Muslim’s faith is the shuttle he mounts to escape the confines of narrow realism.” As events unfold like a collapsing dam in North Africa and the Middle East, the question…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…tamattu’. That means as soon as we can, we follow through in irham to the Kaaba and make umrah. There’s the ihram, then we do tawaf around the Kaaba, sa’iy between Safa and Marwa, clip the hair, and we are done. We get to leave ihram until we take it up again for hajj proper, which will be about a week from now. Mr. Mansour then gave us some logistics about finding our way back to the hotel. Find a marker to help you go out of Door Number One, the…

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

By Spencer Dew

…on of shared American values of inclusion and possibility. David Green in Haaretz wrote that the “extemporaneous remarks” in reaction to the question about the poem “betray the real attitude of both Miller and the administration he represents: a closing of the door, not only on entry to America, but to access for those already in the country to all the things that the United States has symbolized to both its citizens and those outside it, for at l…

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

By Peter Laarman

…l not allow a beachhead of intolerance to spread in our nation,” and even managed to associate the name of Thomas Jefferson with his pledge to “totally destroy” the so-called Johnson 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 imagine…