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

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…; readers need information, but don’t know where to begin asking. Rob Bell might be serving a similar function. As he told me, people make a lot of very basic assumptions when it comes to religion. And they are not assumptions based on knowledge. “I’ll just ask people, ‘what do you mean?’ Even the word ‘God’—what do you mean by that? And you’ll talk to them and it’ll end up like ‘basically an old man in the sky who either gets involved or not.’ We…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

…sly reading feminist theology, seminal secular feminist books, attending seminary and forming Femmevangelical, a ministry aimed at helping women heal from religious patriarchy. Today Jennifer is an ordained pastor and leading evangelical feminist voice who is working to dismantle patriarchy in the church, pressing old-school leaders to back policies that advance women’s access to family planning services and advancing a conversation among women of…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…od, 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 courage to ‘come out’ with my secular beliefs. Prior to having a social group, I felt alone without a way to overcome judgement from religious family membe…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…ll the time—but that, by mapping a certain conflict, in certain terms, you miss all the other ways that religion and science, interact, mingle, and, yes, clash. An even bigger problem is that journalists often treat the pollster’s map as territory. Rather than scrutinize the pollster’s methods, they report their findings as object facts and add their own spin. Readers are left with a map of a map—a caricature, drawn in thick lines on thin paper. A…

Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…, speculating, and damn, those kids are all doing x, y, and z on their cellphones, and it’s an outrage! Pew’s study of cellphone etiquette gives us one way to begin digging into a much larger set of questions: which norms do we, and should we, place around the use of digital tools? When are these opinions just personal preferences, and when do they take on a more explicit ethical dimension? When should we enforce them? Part of the problem is that…

Godly Game or Godless Satire? Countering Biblical Ignorance with Heretical Humor

By Betsy Shirley

…the Old Testament because they’re long and boring…” Here pauses. “Granted, Numbers is like…” “I like Numbers, but anyway…” mumbles Caleb. “The real impetus for the game,” Thomas resumes, “is to get people to engage in Scripture and read stories they’ve never read before. When a concubine is cut up into twelve pieces, that imagery is really offensive. But a lot of people didn’t even know that story existed in the Bible.” I suspect they’re right; re…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…the decision will be made. We are participating in a Catholic-to-Catholic phone bank that Washington United for Marriage has set up on Wednesday nights and we assist with the larger phone bank at the Jewish synagogue downtown. A great deal of our work is communicating with Catholics on our email list and Facebook. As a Catholic, how does your faith shape your views on marriage for LGBT people? My faith blossomed in the 1960s after Vatican II. I h…

A Tale of Religious Tolerance… On Reddit

By Joanna Piacenza

…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 general and anyone else who might have taken offense to his posting. Reddit in search of mindless memes beware: between the cat videos and bizarre news stories you might just find some religious tolerance….

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…y and ubiquity of image-making. Images can be, and are, made and remade, remixed, and disseminated with lightning speed on the Internet. It’s no accident that there was a long period of ‘silence’ between 1990-2004, with comparatively few assaults on Muslim norms. The Internet was still in the early stages of its global remapping of sensibilities. After 2004, however, the wounds of the 9/11 attacks, and the U.S./Allies’ response to those attacks, m…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…rveys exist in a careful reciprocity with media organizations. Unlike academic work, polls and surveys are often commissioned by the very people who then report on them. Even if Pew or Gallup come to careful, qualified conclusions in their own reports, they have to be sensitive to the way that these results will be picked up by the very media outlets they’re intended to serve. At times, the collusion between reporters and pollsters can verge on th…