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Pastor of Kentucky Church Severed From Baptists Over LGBT Inclusion: Not Activism, Just Honesty

By Mike Greer

…nt Hill was the spiritual home for many students, staff, and distinguished professors. Today the 800-member church is a diverse community of faith including people of various races, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, and world-views. Refugees and immigrants compose roughly one-third of the congregation. The church is heavily invested in a wide array of social ministries in the Commonwealth, the U.S., and the world. Below are excerpts from a c…

Don’t Blame Black Voters: The Obama Non-Effect

By Jonathan L. Walton

…ining factor and consider other variables we get a much clearer picture of Prop. 8’s proponents. Sixty percent of suburbanites supported Prop. 8, as did 82 percent of Republicans. Over half of California voters reside in the suburbs, while as much as 30 percent of the state electorate belongs to the GOP. Moreover, let’s not forget about the over 80 percent of conservative white evangelicals who supported the amendment, and the 64 percent of Cathol…

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

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my…

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…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…recalled sometimes, frequently, or almost always being asked to or feeling pressure to pretend that they are religious. Nearly half of participants were sometimes, frequently, or almost always asked to go along with religious traditions to avoid stirring up trouble (45.3%), and nearly two in five (37.9%) were treated like they don’t understand the difference between right and wrong. Of participants, 26.3% reported that sometimes, frequently or alm…

Education, Texas-Style

By Lauri Lebo

…re of Thomas Jefferson. Given the fact that arguments for a divinely sanctioned natural law background to the U.S. Constitution continually rely on Jefferson’s “Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence as evidence, erasing Jefferson for the sake of combating secularism may prove problematic down the road. I urge you to read the whole piece. But then again little things like cheating and lying don’t matter when you’ve convinced…

Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…participating. I hope it will grow. This is an invitation for people to be proactive. I know Pride is on a Sunday, and it’s a big deal for people to miss church. I understand that. This is an invitation to worship by walking, to worship by using our bodies—Mormon theology has a very specific place for bodies; our spirits came to earth to get bodies—and we are physically putting ourselves in a place to create a sacred space in this march. We will d…

A Tale of Religious Tolerance… On Reddit

By Joanna Piacenza

…pean_douchebag” wasn’t questioning which game the woman was playing on her phone, he was referencing the abundance of facial hair on the young woman’s face—a nod towards her Sikh beliefs of not altering her body image. Unaware that others around him might practice faiths besides his own, “european_douchebag” posted the picture under the Reddit tab “Funny,” hoping to get an elbow-in-the-side snickering reaction from the online community. But what h…

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

By Spencer Dew

…hose picked to actually “communicate” on behalf of the White House (from a Press Secretary who hid “among” bushes and banned cameras from press conferences to a Director of Communications who, in the early and yet also late days of his short-lived job accused one upper administration official of psychological pathology and attributed to another freakish autoerotic skills). The administration now has a problem of having fallen on the wrong side of…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…le is simple: a randomly selected sample of the population, when surveyed, provides a representative microcosm of the elusive whole. In more technical terms, pollsters direct a shrink-ray at the public, and then examine it up close. When it comes to predicting elections, this method works extraordinarily well; elections are the raison d’être, the breadwinner, and the testing ground for pollsters. Their projections are often spot-on. George Gallup,…