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

By Mike Greer

…years. I came about the time that folks from Burma began arriving in large numbers and uniting in membership with Crescent Hill, and much of my time in those early years was spent trying to figure out how in the world we might be able to be a unified body that includes people who don’t speak English, who have a completely foreign background and cultural experience. It took a lot of hard work but we reached a place a number of years ago where, whil…

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

By Jonathan L. Walton

…ck community cast the deciding vote.” Even comedian John Stewart chimed in with a satirical cheap shot declaring that African-American celebration over President-Elect Obama amounted to, “Free at last, free at last—whoa, whoa, [referring to an image of two men holding hands]—where are you two going?” Tragicomic, indeed. I understand that emotions over the passing of Proposition 8 in California are high. Seeing as my household was among those that…

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

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…and its currency is symbols, rituals, myths, and concepts. It takes place within communities that act, and interact, and is set within specific cultures. These are brief definitions wrenched from larger contexts and intended to be used for further investigation, but they begin to suggest that Maher somehow escaped from (or slept through) his religious studies courses in college. Thus, he’s right back where our eighteen-year-olds are when they sta…

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

…the diversity of American Atheists’ national staff and the organization’s willingness to partner with religious organizations to work toward the common good, as the pluralism inherent in democracy demands. With respect to the terminology of “coming out,” one of the qualitative responses included in Reality Check, identified as coming from a female respondent in Kentucky, reads in part, “Joining an atheist/humanist meetup group helped me have the…

Education, Texas-Style

By Lauri Lebo

…constitutional republic”; • Portraying Sen. Joe McCarthy and his Communist 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…

Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…Society [women’s auxiliary] meeting was a Proposition 8 organizing meeting—with phone trees and the bishop coming in and saying you’ve got to do this. We just left shaking, and she hasn’t gone back. She never set foot in that building again. Through my kids’ eyes, I see things in a fresh way. So I was thinking about the Utah Pride Parade, which is now almost bigger than the Days of ’47 [Pioneer Day parade commemorating Mormon pioneers]. This is a…

A Tale of Religious Tolerance… On Reddit

By Joanna Piacenza

…like, heck, my kids will forget my voice, and slowly, all physical memory will fade away. However, my impact and legacy will remain: and, by not focusing on the physical beauty, I have time to cultivate those inner virtues and hopefully, focus my life on creating change and progress for this world in any way I can. After watching his mobile upload turn against him, “european_douchebag” finally apologized to the online community, Kaur, Sikhs in ge…

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

By Spencer Dew

…re the poor of the world will be limited in their achievements only by the will with which they tug at their own bootstraps. And, yes, as Miller would say, both of these idealized conceptions of the nation are “ahistorical.” The religious imagination focuses beyond history for a reason: history is often ugly, cruel, a theater of the worst and most petty aspects of human nature. Looking beyond this, investing faith in our desires for a better world…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…en, mostly talking about Christian views. In doing so, it’s essentially conflating “Christian” with “American,” a strategy typically associated more with Ben Carson than with Gallup. More generally, polls obscure a certain messiness in the American polity. Syncretism, idiosyncrasy, and inconsistency are regular features of individuals’ spiritual lives. Little of that gets captured when you scale people up into categories. The complexities and weir…