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What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…ief revisiting here. A Missouri state program offered grants for a limited number of nonprofit schools and daycares to purchase rubber playground surfaces made from recycled tires. Prospective grantees were evaluated and selected based on a number of factors, including poverty level of the surrounding area and their willingness to generate media exposure for Missouri. In 2012, Trinity Lutheran, a Missouri Synod congregation, applied for the grant…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…

Is The Episcopal Church Driving Drunk?

By J. Terry Todd

…e. In one of its articles CP linked Cook to Gene Robinson and to other Episcopal Bishops–including a dead one–with alcohol problems. (Robinson went to rehab during his episcopacy). An editorial that ran on the website of the American Anglican Council called the incident “[s]ad for the Episcopal Church that has fallen so far away from godly discipline and order.” The right-wing Anglican blogosphere was more direct: “The most recent outrage (and the…

Passover with Mohammed: A Jewish Journalist in Yemen

By Sam Kestenbaum

…een given a second chance. Shem wandered through the desert, following the flight of a bird that led him south to a wide valley where Sana’a now sits. Khalid points to a jagged mountain rising above the city. “Shem came from there.” It almost sounds like he’s talking about something that just happened, like Shem could be coming to visit this afternoon. Times seem to overlap—the ancient bubbling into the present, the mythical figures of Moses and S…

Illinois Bishop Greets Marriage Equality with Exorcism

By Peter Montgomery

…nd power of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paprocki said. “Be uprooted and put to flight from the Church of God from souls created in the image of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the divine lamb. “Dare no more, oh cunning serpent, to deceive the human race, to persecute the church of God, to shake the chosen of God and sift them like wheat,” he continued. In an unusual use of public services, the exorcism included two armed Springfield police o…

RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

By Nathan Schneider

…n, in his post-presidential years, when he could wear a pink tie and speak freely. He was talking in just this way. His “schema,” to use your word, for understanding the world is one of interconnection and relationship, very much in the terms that you describe. Maybe I should send him a copy of the book; here as in so many areas lately he seems to have forgotten what he once knew Maybe you should. And that raises the question—Clinton isn’t talking…

The Racial Politics of Atheism

By Sikivu Hutchinson

…for this, while at the same time providing a radical voice for the growing numbers of openly identified non-believers of color. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? That humanism can be culturally relevant to communities of color. Traditional mainstream white-dominated freethought/atheist/humanist models don’t offer an adequate basis for social justice. They don’t address the intersection of women’s rights, civil rights, anti-r…

Faith and Football: What the Gospel Church Can Learn from the NFL

By Douglas Harrison

…nd liberated possibilities (thanks again, Joe Biden). But who knew it would turn out that the NFL has a thing or two to teach the gospel church—born of, but these days largely in flight from, the legacy of King and Rustin and Baldwin—about love, acceptance, and the struggle to overcome in a world of injustice?…

Mark Driscoll Hate-Tweets as Pope Benedict Flip-Flops: This Week in Religion and Social Media

By Elizabeth Drescher

…lize that in this way they are proposing the pursuit of a false peace. The flight from responsibility, which degrades human persons, and even more so the killing of a defenseless and innocent being, will never be able to produce happiness or peace. Indeed how could one claim to bring about peace, the integral development of peoples or even the protection of the environment without defending the life of those who are weakest, beginning with the unb…