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

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…request for a permit by saying they could not guarantee activists’ safety United Methodist Church: Bishops create commission to avoid schism over sexuality issues The United Methodist Church, whose global policy-making body met May 10-20 in its quadrennial General Conference, is “struggling to avoid a split over gay rights,” according to Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll. The church has 12 million members worldwide, 7 million of those…

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

By Frederick Clarkson

…n between this Church and other bodies, there shall arise a more inclusive United Church.” We don’t know if the United Church of Christ is called to die as an institution; but if it is, it will do so called by the Holy Spirit to create space for what may emerge for the sake of a movement we committed to being wholly a part of. What we do know is that this impulse towards an organic unity, fully reflective of what was intended by Jesus when he pray…

Six Overlooked Gems from the Future of World Religions Report

By Timothy King

…also not clear if being “unaffiliated” really means the same thing in the United States as elsewhere. Take that earlier number of 68% of the “unaffiliated” believing in God or a higher power in the United States. That drops to 30% in France (233). According to that previous Pew research, one reason more people identify as “unaffiliated” now is that people who used to skip church and not really believe anything in particular simply felt a social p…

Exclusion is Causing Great Harm: A Conversation With Suspended UMC Pastor Rev. Cynthia Meyer

By Joel Pitney

…riends. I have a daughter who is 21, and she really has no interest in the United Methodist Church at this point. That’s a sad loss. So many people who might otherwise be attracted to the United Methodist Church—with its care for the larger world and commitment to social justice—are put off by the stance on these issues. Those who are LGBT, or who have family members or people important to them who are LGBT (and that includes about everybody), now…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…e-land in just a few short decades. The ascent of same-sex marriage in the United States gained much (but not all) of its initial support from churches. Many local Universalist Unitarian (UU), Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ (UCC) congregations, and some Episcopal churches, for example, started blessing same-sex unions as far back as the 1970s, as work by Heather White and Mark Jordan has shown. Over the years the debate and activ…

Contraception Isn’t Meat

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ario, Jains run a number of large institutions with many employees, a high number of whom are not Jain. At some point, a number of people realize that the current system is a complicated and inefficient way to feed people, and so there are attempts at reforming the system. One of the questions that the would-be reformers have to consider is: What do most people, in fact, eat? That’s important, because they are trying to craft a system that takes i…

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

By Annika Brockschmidt

…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…he early afternoon, cameras in hand. It is not uncommon for tourists to outnumber monks in the debate courtyards during this time. This is obviously disruptive, making a spectacle out of a serious educational pursuit. Monastic response to the Chinese government policy of limiting monastic enrollments is at least in part the result of a clash between the secular, materialist, security-concerned worldview of the Chinese state, and the religious, tra…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quickly ran into a problem that’s been under discussion for at least two th…