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You’re Either Committing Ethnic Cleansing or You’re Not

By Haroon Moghul

…the average viewer would have no frame of reference for it. Serbs refer to Turkish treachery in the past, for example, yet it’s not clear if anyone would know that Bosnian Muslims are not Turks—that they are ethnically and linguistically the same as Serbs. The two are, in fact, differentiated by religious affiliation, which has become not a matter of choice or conviction, but of identity, and thus political destiny. Worse, though, is that we never…

United Nations Affirms the Human Right to Blaspheme

By Austin Dacey

…urt of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which has upheld Austrian, British, and Turkish laws against blasphemy and religious insult by invoking a sui generis right to “respect for the religious feelings of believers.” The major disappointment in the comment, in my view, is its failure to address hate speech laws, which in many countries function as de facto restrictions on blasphemy and sacrilege. Theoretically, we can distinguish between bashing a bel…

The Garden of Eden: A Dull Place? Paradise Lust Author Explains…

By Nathan Schneider

…of his life, for instance, on Creation and the Second Coming, and even the Turkish creationist Harun Yahya promised me when I met him that Jesus would return in ten years and evolutionism would be done with—well, that’s seven years, now. So what has Eden to do with the end? What note will you tuck in it when you mail a review copy to Harold Camping? Is that seven years exactly? I’ll have to mark my calendar. I wouldn’t bother. So, yes, Eden is als…

Broadcast Officials in China Censor Gay TV Characters

By Peter Montgomery

…y LGBTQ faith-based organization in the region. It works primarily in Anglophone countries but has plans to expand further in Africa, with additional focus on Francophone regions. There is no group or organization in the region that addresses the needs of LGBTQ and MSM Muslims. Mambaonline.com published an interview this week with a lesbian couple whose marriage in December generated media coverage that led to both positive and negative responses,…

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…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…

How to Choose a Tour Company for Your Hajj

By Amina Wadud

…nts than their quota allows. Most Muslim countries have a quota; a limited number of hajjis permitted from that country in any one year. This number is set by hajj authorities in Saudi Arabia, because, in all fairness, there has to be a cap on how many Muslims converge on the place. Right now, it stands at around 3 million! Countries with large populations of Muslims have many more applicants than their allotted number of pilgrims. This means you…

Who Is “Sam Bacile?”

By Sarah Posner

…d that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video’s purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula’s address. —- For more RD coverage of the events in Libya see “Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuses,” by Haroon Moghul — ed….

South Asian Religious Leaders Challenged to Take on Stigma and Discrimination: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…o Nazis and Communists. Last week British official released figures on the number of same-sex couples who got married between March 29 – the first day marriage was legally available in England and Wales, and June 30. Of the 1,409 marriages, 56 percent were to female couples. According to Gay Star News, about 120,000 people are in civil partnerships, which they will be able to convert to marriages beginning in December. Costa Rica: Survey Shows Spl…

Seeking Broad Appeal to US Christians, ‘God & Country: The Rise of Christian Nationalism’ Glosses Over Critical Context

By Chrissy Stroop

…ngelicals, including Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore, the cheap grace to distance themselves from their Christian nationalist coreligionists without interrogating the authoritarian aspects of their own theology, you inevitably fail to fully account for the causes of January 6. Those causes very much include common and inherently authoritarian evangelical beliefs like the theology of male “headship” and female submission, of which…