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The Same Toxic Christian Right Theology Supports Both the Online Bullying I Experienced and the Cruel Anti-Trans Policy in TX — And it’s Not Remotely Fringe

By Chrissy Stroop

…ing in Texas and elsewhere across the United States. The dehumanization of members of targeted groups on display in the bullying derives support from conservative theology, and in turn paves the way for state-sponsored persecution of, and extralegal violence against, members of the targeted groups. There’s no more room for doubt about the extent to which an authoritarian ethos characterizes the mainstream of American evangelicalism, and the human…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…seem to mean something to many of those seated around me, though. Audience members asked Bell how to teach their children about Jesus without repeating anything they didn’t believe themselves; or how to respond to parents of the youth-group they lead who want to know how much they taught the kids about Jesus. “Isn’t that their job?” Bell asked, to murmured assent. He clearly had no patience for conservative theology, for institutions that insist,…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…DS Church should be pleased. Although the Church can claim only 14 million members (an exaggerated statistic that counts all baptisms and births, but not the actual number of churchgoers), representatives of the religion—and representations of it—have managed to become fixtures in popular culture. I don’t have a complete explanation for this, but I would point first to the post-9/11 zeitgeist. In the last decade, there was a national and global de…

Crisis in Sudan: ‘If the World Stands Idly By This Time, They Will Bring Genocide’

By Frederick Clarkson

…r—and the razing of El Feid, the home village of his leading opponent. The members of the State Election Committee received threats that they had to declare Haroun the winner or they would be killed. These things are well known in South Kordofan. Haroun and Sudanese President al-Bashir, also wanted by the ICC for war crimes and genocide, are continuing what they began in the 1985-2002 conflict and genocide. The government began to isolate us from…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…he early afternoon, cameras in hand. It is not uncommon for tourists to outnumber monks in the debate courtyards during this time. This is obviously disruptive, making a spectacle out of a serious educational pursuit. Monastic response to the Chinese government policy of limiting monastic enrollments is at least in part the result of a clash between the secular, materialist, security-concerned worldview of the Chinese state, and the religious, tra…

The Forgotten Nones: The High Cost of Fleeing Fundamentalist Religion

By Andreea Nica

…eived of as one-way communication versus a dialogue between leadership and members. Leaving fundamentalist, strict religions can have negative health consequences, both perceived and actual, that manifest in the body and mind. Research shows that individuals who come out to family members, specifically as an atheist—a strongly stigmatized identity in the U.S., only slightly more popular than Muslims—report that families often react with anger and…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

Hell, in Rob Bell’s Own Words: State of Belief Radio

By The Editors

…global military super-power called the Roman Empire, and they had lots of military propaganda convincing people of its noble intentions while it went around the world basically crushing everybody in its path. And these first Christians took that military propaganda of a good news, of another city that Caesar had vanquished, and they used it to talk about Jesus, who they believed was the true Lord, who said there’s a better way to be in the world…

“Hey You! Anti-Semite!”: A Jewish Krewe does Mardi Gras

By Barbra Barnett

…to rub elbows with dealmakers and power brokers. Today non-discrimination membership policies are a prerequisite to parading through public streets. However, some of the oldest clubs, including the original Comus, have stopped parading because they would rather not disclose their membership standards. Jews were often, but not always, excluded from these patently goyisha festivities. In 1872 the first Rex, “King of Carnival,” was Jewish businessma…