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Perry’s Challenge to Bachmann for Religious Right Vote

By Sarah Posner

…erry’s anticipated announcement—is Ryan Lizza’s profile of Bachmann in the New Yorker. Some of it will not be news to regular RD readers; for example, he goes into some detail about her legal education at Oral Roberts University, which I delved into for a feature we published last month. Lizza’s probing of Bachmann herself about how Francis Schaeffer’s films and writings influenced her is telling and interesting; he misses a few crucial things, th…

Most U.S. Catholics Back Marriage Equality, But Knights of Columbus Pour Millions into Opposition

By Peter Montgomery

…is money, and lots of it, from big donors. A new in-depth report released today by Equally Blessed, a coalition of pro-equality Catholic organizations, reveals that the Knights are among NOM’s biggest supporters. The Knights of Columbus is the world’s largest Roman Catholic fraternal order, with an astonishing $16.9 billion in assets. Its financial power comes from a huge and profitable life insurance business it promotes through local councils a…

How the Politics of the 1890s Explain the GOP’s Health Care Woes

By Patricia Miller

…Cleveland back to the White House in 1892. Suddenly in charge again after running against the tariff and the Silver Act, they, like today’s GOP, were in the hook to make good on their promises of returning America to better, simpler days without government interference. Then, the worst depression of the nineteenth century, the Panic of 1893, hit. The Democrats put all their efforts into repealing the Silver Act, which it blamed for the country’s…

Police in Ferguson Keep Praying and Preying

By Anthea Butler

…derick Douglass’ Slaveholding Religion and the Christianity of Christ. His words still ring true with regard to the empty prayers of the police in Ferguson “They attend with pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.” If there’s to be any justice for the shooting of Michael Brown, the pandering religiosity of the law enforcement officials will h…

Who Are Michigan Catholic Bishops to Judge?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…and thriving. But perhaps Pope Francis himself put it best: The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. Judge Bernard Friedman tripped yet another lock on small-minded rules this week in Michigan. Here’s hoping that Michigan’s Roman Catholic bishops and other religious leaders will use this moment as an opportunity to m…

Birtherism, Conspiracy Theories, and the “Christian Nation”

By Sarah Posner

…like Obama who likes gay people. They mean, as Graham said to Christianity Today yesterday, “a true follower of Jesus Christ and not just by name,” someone who will “obey” and not, say, support LGBT rights. Someone like Mike Huckabee, who “no question this man is saved.” Count the ways in which Obama is untrustworthy, for his opponents, exemplifying the opposite of “biblical truth”: he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a Muslim country; hi…

Modern Mindfulness, Continued: Chade-Meng Tan Follows Up

By The Editors

…in high concentrations, but only in small areas. Perhaps the opposite is true in America today. 3. I think the most important point in this discussion is that we have to hold teachers to a different bar than normal practitioners. For normal practitioners, if they do as little as one breath per day, and if they just benefit in some small way, I’m happy for them. But teachers need to have deep practices and deep understanding of Dharma. That’s the…

Single Greatest Idea Ever: On the 150th Anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species

By Lauri Lebo

…rn-again Christian Kirk Cameron, along with evangelist Ray Comfort, led a crusade at college campuses around the United States and Canada, distributing free altered copies of Origin of Species. Because Origin is in the public domain, Comfort was legally able to add to the book his own new 50-page introduction, in which he quotes from Mein Kampf in order to link Darwin to Adolf Hitler, accuses Darwin of being sexist, and argues falsely that there a…

Jesus Comes Out for Christmas

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…anything controversial. The fact is, Jesus did confront his culture with truth—and he ended up being crucified because of it.” Actually, Jeffress is mostly right. If you don’t want a wimpy Jesus, then this rainbow-haloed baby Jesus is the one you want. A butch Jesus. You see, once this baby grew up, he did the one thing that every gay and lesbian person knows requires all the courage in the world—he came out. If you read the gospels you see Jesus…

New Report: Young People Leaving Church for Science

By Paul Wallace

…y more polarized today than it was in, say, 1978. I know that anti-science runs amok in churches today. I read about it every day. But because the churches I’ve attended have been neither conservative nor reactionary, and because I’ve spent the large majority of my adult years on university campuses, I don’t have any direct exposure to life in anti-science congregations. Have any of you left the church (or a church) mainly because of its antagonis…