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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

By Haroon Moghul

…ere were few greater acts to earn merit in God’s eyes. (Compare Abu Bakr’s rules of war, as delivered to his army, to ISIS’ practices. I pronounce the Prophet’s best friend a better interpreter of Islam than poorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently mentioned as a meritorious act in the Muslim tradition that, in the 8th and 9th centuries, biographies of Prophetic companions cited,…

The Atheist Encounter with Christianity: A Failure to Disbelieve?

By Paul Wallace

…c idea, is quickly discarded because it does not speak the truth about the world. A true myth survives because it resonates deeply with lived human experience. A true myth brings one face-to-face with reality and has nothing to do with literalism or the ignoring of scientific evidence. To get to my point: There is found in each of these excerpts, a disconnect between the author’s idea of Christianity and what Christianity actually is. Admittedly,…

Can the Catholic Church Survive Trump?

By Patricia Miller

…ops who signed on for the Reagan deal—agreement on abortion in return for prudential disagreement on economics—were faced in 2016 with the Trump echo: implicit support for a candidate who didn’t just hold positions that Pope Francis had called inconsistent with fundamental teachings of Christianity, but for a candidate who based his entire candidacy and his entire electoral appeal precisely on those “un-Christian” positions. And Byrnes notes the w…

No Time for Casual Faith: The First Unitarian Woman Elected President on our Urgent Moment

By Peter Laarman

…If I am to answer truthfully, I must say that we have lost ground in the struggle for a true revolution of values during the course of these 50 years. We are still in the struggle, but we have lost ground. We see today the commodification of nearly every aspect of our lives: commodification in health care, in education, and even commodification within democracy itself, with the Supreme Court ruling that money is speech and that corporations are es…

NPR Largely Misses Critical Distinction on Religious Freedom vs. LGBTQ Rights

By Sunnivie Brydum

…or the burgeoning “religious freedom” efforts we’re seeing so much more of today. But apart from the particularities of each state, there’s a fairly simple and reasonable solution to the religious freedom conundrum, though it requires the very distinctions between the public and private spaces Gjelten fails to delineate. The First Amendment’s prohibition on state establishment of religion can reasonably be read to mean that government agencies—and…

Mormons React to Prop. 8 Ruling

By Joanna Brooks

…rotect this most fundamental institution—marriage. “There is no doubt that today’s ruling will add to the marriage debate in this country, and we urge people on all sides of this issue to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility toward those with a different opinion.” As we’ve reported here at RD, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, responding to a letter from the Church’s First Presidency read over the pulpits during…

Making Fun of Mormonism

By Max Mueller

…s includes the central document of America’s political and moral self-construction.) Many Mormon scholars believe that, as is the case today with Kennedy’s (and now Newt Gingrich’s) Catholicism, in fifty years the idea of a Mormon in the White House won’t raise many eyebrows at all. Yet what about the short term? One solution is to stop talking about religion as part of a presidential candidate’s resumé altogether. In an op-ed on the Rachel Maddo…

New Patriarch, Same Patriarchy: Despite Glowing Praise For New SBC President, There’s Just One Problem

By Caroline Matas

…of progress. “I’m deeply encouraged by the movement made in the Convention today,” lawyer, abuse survivor and SBC advisor Rachael Denhollander told the Houston Chronicle. “Ed Litton’s character and positions give me hope that significant positive change is possible for the denomination.” Indeed, Litton agreed to an independent audit of the SBC’s handling of sexual abuse issues, a move Southern Baptist author and speaker Daniel Darling lauded in hi…

MN Lawmaker: “How Many Gay People Does God Have to Make?”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…Sexuality and sexual orientation are a gift from God.’ And I think that’s true. I think the scientific evidence shows more and more every day that sexuality and sexual orientation are innate and something people are born with.” ”If that’s true,” Simon told ban supporters, “what does that mean to the moral force of your argument?” Then, he delivered the final blow to the religious argument: “How many gay people does God have to create before we ask…

What American Flag-Worship Looks Like to a New Citizen

By Rosalind C. Hughes

…y, preferably by burning. On the campaign trail last year, then-candidate Trump borrowed the language of flag and religion to cast a utopian vision of America as “one people, under one God, saluting one American flag.” Baptist minister Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 as a ceremonial recitation for schoolchildren celebrating the 400thanniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. As Jeffrey Owen Jones writes: In Bellamy’s…