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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…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…e on the planet is going to be.” Are the walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a…

What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

By Daniel Wise

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…sical violence over their lack of religion. Only .8% of survey respondents reported being physically assaulted over their unbelief, although for African-American respondents the number is 2.5%. Meanwhile, 12% of respondents experienced threats of violence, and 2.5% experienced vandalism (14.2% and 3.2%, respectively, for Latinx respondents). None of these facts make the experience of “coming out” as nonreligious the same as coming out as LGBTQ, bu…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…to manufacture the appearance of certainty. In particular, they choose to report statistics as single numbers (for example, Pew recently found that 24% of Jehovah’s Witnesses describe themselves as born-again) rather than as margin-of-error ranges, normalized around a mean (had it taken that margin into account up-front, the Pew study would have reported that 16.8%-31.2% of Jehovah’s Witnesses believe they’re born again; somehow, that sounds less…

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…

The Lady Vanishes: Trump’s Communications Team Tries to Topple a Monument

By Spencer Dew

…weighed in on the scene, describing Miller as “a Trump apologist telling a reporter that a revered American poem must be dismissed on the ground that it’s a fake law (Miller baited Acosta repeatedly about different moments in immigration history, asking ‘is that violating or not violating the Statue of Liberty law of the land?’)” Acosta promptly tweeted the text of the poem, and Newsweek published it. “A mighty woman with a torch her name / Mother…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…he cancer that had crawled across his body, had lain in bed at home with a phone against his ear while my pastor, who had called him from the pulpit, pointed a cordless phone toward the congregation; we all wept and sang him love songs as he lay dying. These are uniquely evangelical experiences that shaped me, that will always be a part of me. I still long for this kind of community—the kind that journeys together through all the peaks and valleys…

Religious Hostility to Gay Nigerians; The Pope’s Visit To Africa; Ireland’s Religious Schools Can’t Discriminate Against Gays; Orthodox Church in Georgia Leads Anti-Gay Forces; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…hey have their belief system and I have mine and I’m living true to mine.” Dominican Republic: Catholic Cardinal disses openly gay U.S. Ambassador Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez of the Archdiocese of Santo Domingo called the openly gay US Ambassador James “Wally” Brewster “a man’s wife” and suggested he should “stick to housework.” Netherlands: Gays from Middle East face threats from fellow refugees Five gay men — three from Syria, one…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…nd Religion, and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next! Look, we’re trying. Reporting the report While the study provided a bevy of individual findings to choose from, with one major exception, journalists generally selected one element of the survey data and rebroadcast it, accepting the report’s claims at face value. We dragged a wide net through the media ocean, and found that responses to the survey tended to fall into one of three categories….