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

By Chrissy Stroop

…eir nonreligious identity. When RD recently spoke with American Atheists’ Gill over the phone, she also noted that her organization and others like it “hear from constituents every day who have complaints about their children facing discrimination and bullying in school, how they’re at risk at work for talking about their beliefs, how they’re not able to access government services.” Stigmatized minority or bullies without a pulpit? The representat…

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…

Education, Texas-Style

By Lauri Lebo

…t witch hunt smears as being vindicated by history; • The removal of the children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear from the curriculum because its author Bill Martin shares the same name with a Marxist scholar; • The requirement that president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address must be taught alongside the writings of President Abraham Lincoln; • Their voting down an amendment that would have required students to know how “the fou…

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

By Peter Laarman

…gh, gonna tell them all that fighting the bad guys won’t be pretty for a while. Let’s see if the Sunday School types at the Hilton tomorrow are ready to face reality. OK, God, this has been a good conversation. You’ve been great. So great. I’ve always been the best at praying. You know who told me that? Billy Graham himself. He told me, “Donald, you pray better than I do, and I am the most famous Christian in the world.” He told me that last week…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…ld, and my faith became about service to others and seeing everyone as a child of God. The civil rights movement also made an impact on my faith. When our bishops sent out a letter in February 2012 to the churches asking us to work to get the referendum on the ballot, I thought, this isn’t Catholic, this isn’t Christian. I called my legislators and said, “I’m a Catholic, and I’m really in support of this bill.” My friends and I got together and st…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…urately predicted this way, including voting behavior, because they are easily distilled into multiple choice questions. “Are you voting for Hillary/Sanders or Rubio/Christie next week?” is a straightforward question. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are fuzzy. They’re dynamic and complicated. It isn’t unusual for Americans to fall one way on an ethical issue when discussing it at church and then, in another context later that week, shift a f…

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

…that, as we reported last week, was adopted by the UN’s Human Rights Council, while noting there is much more work to be done to safeguard LGBTI people in South Africa and the rest of the continent. …South Africa must be applauded for its leadership on this issue at the global level. Now it must work to bring the rest of the continent along….As the economic powerhouse on the continent, South Africa’s foreign policy challenge over the long term in…

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…

The Real Story Behind Rick Perry’s Secret Meetings with Pastors

By Sarah Posner

…Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Rod Parsley, who, like John Hagee, is apparently making a comeback after being rejected by McCain in 2008; Jerry Boykin, the retired general who was found to have violated Pentagon rules in 2004 for giving a speech in uniform in which he said God placed George W. Bush in office and that a “spiritual army” was being recruited to defeat Islam; and the Re…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

…eption, and I try to sketch an alternative vision found in the work of Bataille and Kaja Silverman. And, of course, because I describe the project’s politics as, in part, feminist, some people wonder why I’m discussing only representations of male bodies. To think that critiques of masculinity aren’t absolutely essential to a feminist political project, or that the fate of feminist political struggle isn’t completely bound up with cultural represe…