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The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…et of Americans respond to leading questions, posed by strangers, over the phone. But it’s science! Public opinion polling ends up existing in a strange gray space between science and journalism. A Pew report is definitively not a scientific paper: its goal is to serve media outlets, not to advance a body of academic inquiry. It’s not peer-reviewed. Its methods lack the scope and rigor of a formal social science study. That doesn’t make these repo…

Are You There God? It’s Me, Donald: A President at Prayer

By Peter Laarman

…amous Christian in the world.” He told me that last week in a great, great phone call. Oh, and Fred Douglass. I need to get his input, too. Just this morning I told them, the great African Americans who supported me completely, what an amazing job Fred is doing, being recognized more and more. They loved it. They love me. My speech was a the biggest success in the history of black people. The media lied about it, of course. They said I didn’t know…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

Religious Resistance to Bolivian Gender Law; US Religious Right Celebrates Court OK For Romanian Marriage Initiative; Will LGBTs Be Banned from Indonesian TV?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…$119.1 billion annually. Hannah Harris Green reports on the ongoing legal flight of LGBT refugees, taking note of a recent decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit that an immigration judge had erred in refusing to acknowledge an asylum seeker’s transgender identity. The article touches on those seeking asylum in Canada, Australia, and Europe. An excerpt: This decision means that transgender immigrants who fight their cases in the…

RD10Q: What is Black Religion?

By William D. Hart

…powers that be. Finally, an Afro-Eccentric perspective provides a line of flight from the totalitarian blackness that often characterizes Afrocentric perspectives. Anything you had to leave out? A reader of the book in manuscript form suggested that I shorten the text by removing a substantial amount of material that dealt with scholarly/theoretical deviations from the Standard Narrative of Black Religion. I plan to publish that material separate…

Useless and Useful: A True Sage Reviews The Tao of Happiness

By Alan Levinovitz

…is about one animal metamorphosing into another animal. Lin titles it “The Flight of the Peng Bird.” This is his version: In the Northern Sea, there is a giant fish. Its name is Kun. Its size is incredibly large. No one knows how many thousands of miles its length measures. The Kun fish is able to transform into a bird, known as Peng. The Peng bird is also incredibly large. No one knows how many thousands of miles its wingspan measures. Peng chang…

Blame Series Bonus: How Federal Policy Created America’s Fergusons

By Andrew Aghapour

…Justice Department has made for Ferguson and which it has also made for a number of other cities around the country, are important. But the problems they’re addressing are a symptom. It’s not to say the symptom shouldn’t be treated, but the underlying cause of these problems is the fact that we’ve segregated housing throughout metropolitan areas in the country for the last century. And unless we are as aggressive in desegregating neighborhoods as…

Capricology: Divine Madness

By Salman Hameed

…s the ability to instantly acquire the skills she needs to get through the flight simulator. She argues in effect that she doesn’t want to do things the easy way; she wants to earn her way through the virtual world. I am reminded of the ongoing debates around multiplayer games about what constitutes cheating and whether it is appropriate for a character to pay real cash to buy a ready-made avatar which can function at higher levels than they have…

Theocracy: “What Would Be So Bad About It?”

By Julie Ingersoll

…was made out to be and explains his theodicy as a response to his family’s flight from the Armenian genocide in Turkey. His whole life project was to try to figure out what could protect you. In the end, he came down to the only thing that is solid is God’s law. Well, you say the word law in the 20th or 21st century, and people break out in a rash. I’m not sure why she used the word theodicy — which is an attempt to answer the theological problem…