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

By Chrissy Stroop

…Practically everyone he knows is an atheist, he says, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. As someone who grew up in central Indiana and Colorado Springs, where I was sent to evangelical schools, his attitude both bemused and concerned me. The disconnect just serves to illustrate that how one answers this question may vary wildly depending on where one sits—in some cases quite literally. According to a new report from American Ath…

How Does an Atheist Come to Believe in God?: An Interview with Jacob Needleman

By Lisa Webster

…eman asks the question in earnest, and then proceeds—in the course of this most personal of the dozen or so books he’s written—to answer it. What is God?, out last month from Tarcher/Penguin, is an intellectual autobiography—the story of Needleman’s education and formation as a scholar and teacher—but it’s also a narrative of what might be called a conversion. A young Ivy-educated professor, “allergic” to religion, enthralled by science, finds him…

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…atedly since. The 9/11 Decade tells the inside story of the 21st century’s most significant conflict in three one-hour episodes: “The Intelligence War,” “The Image War,” and “The Clash of Civilizations?” which strives to make three points: that al-Qaeda lost the intelligence war, rather than the CIA winning it; that al-Qaeda had a remarkably efficient propaganda machine, but disbanded it; and that far from a war of civilizations between the West a…

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

By Spencer Dew

…ory for a reason: history is often ugly, cruel, a theater of the worst and most petty aspects of human nature. Looking beyond this, investing faith in our desires for a better world, striving to live in keeping with a set of radically ahistorical ideals, makes life a meaningful struggle. Such faith, on the level of the state, turns the practices of democratic citizenship into a quest for “a more perfect union,” a society synonymous with the ideals…

A Tale of Religious Tolerance… On Reddit

By Joanna Piacenza

…happened next speaks volumes of Reddit contributors. Although many of the mostly white, liberal, and somewhat-educated young male audience showed their ignorance for diverse religious values, most bit back. Reddit peers verbally tore “european_douchebag” apart, castigating him for not only taking a creepy smartphone picture of an innocent young woman, but for taunting her based on her physical appearance—a physical appearance that, in her mind (t…

Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…them was that he has an openly gay teacher who, he told me, “is one of the most spiritual people” he knows. “What is this Church if there is no place for him?” my son asked me. Another story: I took my daughter to college at UCLA in September 2008. We were living in Connecticut then, so I had no idea what Proposition 8 was, but we saw all these Proposition 8 signs. I took her to the LDS student ward [congregation] on Sunday, and find out what Prop…

Education, Texas-Style

By Lauri Lebo

…he inter-workings of the three branches of U.S. governments, the basics of most high school civics classes. But to simply take out the writings of one of our most influential founding fathers and one of the leading intellectual forces of democracy is not just being literal and simple-minded. That’s Orwellian propaganda. But this short-sighted maneuver could actually backfire. By downgrading Jefferson’s writings, they’re forgetting a document that…

Gay Marriage Opponents Running on Empty

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…Baltimore. At the first, about a dozen volunteers spent the night making almo*]}*st 300 phone calls and collecting pledges of volunteer support and contributions from 50 new supporters. Add that to the five other locations holding similar phone banks or collecting post cards of support, and I’m sure we easily got our 300 today. In addition, Equality Maryland hosted an interfaith meeting to mobilize supportive faith leaders. It was so great to see such…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…rs a week. Then, we have people around the state working in their parishes—most of it on the west side of the state, where 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 Catholi…

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

By Michael Schulson

…Program’s role has been to address the societal implications of the field, mostly through a series of initiatives at the Library of Congress (although there’s also an astrobiology-themed, NASA-funded student debate competition. Most recent topic: “Resolved: An overriding ethical obligation to protect and preserve extraterrestrial microbial life and ecosystems should be incorporated into international law.”) The Library has a Chair in Astrobiology…