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How (Not) to Understand What Mormons Believe

By Joanna Brooks

…ntial Mormon involvement in other state LGBT equality battles. But his new site has nothing to do with redressing the damage from Proposition 8. It’s all about using the 2012 presidential campaign to make Mormons feel ashamed just for being Mormons. The site itself is flat and juvenile. It’s been denounced by the Los Angeles Times. (And it’s already been infiltrated by savvy Mormon folks and their allies.) But it participates in a mode of anti-Mor…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…e of not just the ways, but indeed the requirement, that scholarship works best when it breaks out of the ivory tower and engages more of a public audience. Currently the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Manseau has been writing with curiosity and verve about our spiritual ancestors for two decades now. A founder of Killing the Buddha alongside Sharlet, Manseau is a prodigious, pr…

RD News Round-Up—Oct.14, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…ct the hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian people who are doing their best to raise the children they have adopted. As someone who adopted a child, Cindy and I know better than most couples the amazing satisfaction that comes from providing love to an unwanted child. I believe a child is best raised by a mother and father because of the unique contributions that they make together to the development of a child.” McCain refused to rule out nom…

“The Camp Is a Ceremony”: A Report From Standing Rock

By Marion Grau

…zes us with its eyes while we continue destroying our common livelihood. A Site of Pilgrimage Already While a poster onsite says “no pilgrims,” it refers only to the Puritan settlers of history. In fact, the Oceti Sakowin camp receives many pilgrims each day. They come from indigenous nations around the world, and there are many instances of sharing of food and resources. When I was there for the second time, for a few days this week, donations of…

Purpose Driven Atheism: Secular Maharishis Seeking True Believers

By Frank Schaeffer

…bout thanksgiving, shared suffering, loss, pain, generosity, and love. The best religious people and the best secular people learn to ignore our chosen (or inherited) religions’ nastier teachings (be those found in the Bible or in the “science” of eugenics and white racial superiority) in order to preserve the spirit of our faiths, be it a faith in secular humanism, science, God or in all of the above. It’s the tediously consistent fundamentalists…

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…

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

By Michael Schulson

…titutions take in large sums. The Grims are trying to turn a truism into a number. That’s always a delicate exercise. At best, figures can help us grapple with the experience of living in a mass society. But they can also produce a kind of false certainty that obscures more than it clarifies. So, does religious activity really account for 7% of the U.S. GDP? Perhaps. It depends on how you define religion. By any reasonable measure, the Grims’ $1.1…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…p struggling and to plan to “die with dignity.” You’ve also said that “the best days of the United Church of Christ are ahead of us.” What do the best days look like in a time of managing what you’ve called “diminishment”? For me, it is important to see the 1957 merger that created the United Church of Christ—not as the establishment of an institutional expression of the church or the creation of a new denominational identity, but as the birth of…

Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

By Paula M. Cooey

…of those who are not on the face of it evil), how can this possibly be the best of all worlds? And if this is the best of all worlds, what does this have to say about its creator? And if this is not the best of all possible worlds, and still God’s creation is good, what does this have to say about its creator? In other words, if God is benevolent or good, how can God be all powerful, given human suffering? If God is all powerful, how can God possi…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…American abortions as part of her “Birmingham Letter Project.” The BLP Web site features a dyptic photograph of a hip, white pro-life man wearing red “Life” duct tape over his mouth next to three black civil rights marchers being hosed into the side of a building by segregationist police. (The injection of righteousness the association brings to the anti-abortion movement prompts even less self-conscious posturing, as a group of white anti-abortio…