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Are Atheists Taking 1st Amendment Suits Too Far?

By Gordon Haber

While sanctimonious conservatives and godless liberals alike await the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Hobby Lobby case, two more suits with serious church and state implications are quietly making their way through the system. The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is a group of “atheists, agnostics and skeptics” with a Scientology-esque fondness for litigation. Recently the FFRF has gone after the so-called “parsonage exemption,” which allow…

“Stress Test” a Con: Obama Still Coddling Banks

By Peter Laarman

…taphor, forgetting that the so-called patient being “tested” is actually an 800-pound gorilla that needs to be put into a cage if not shot dead outright. Johnson pointed out this morning that today’s news non-event even has a kind of Goldilocks character that the big media are bound to lap right up. It will turn out that the $1 trillion in TARP is an amount “just right” to cover the self-declared capital needs of the big banks. Bernanke said this…

Conservative Christians Oppose New ‘Inter-Religious’ University

By Philip Clayton

…pursuing interreligious collaboration in teaching, research, ministry, and service.” Why would this relatively benign-sounding news frighten conservatives so deeply? Yet resistance from the Christian Right has already been swift and strong. Even prior to the June 9th announcement, conservative protests within the United Methodist Church led to a withholding of operating funds for Claremont (about $800,000 a year). Mark Tooley, President of the Ins…

Gay Marriage to End “Culture Wars”?

By Bill Berkowitz

…eceived $10,000 as a subcontractor with the Department of Health and Human Services for work supporting the Bush Administration’s Community Healthy Marriage Initiative while writing laudatory columns about it). “What is at stake in the California marriage debate now taking place?” asked Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, which helped qualify Proposition 8 for the ballot, in a recent piece for the National Review…

Normalization is Control: Telling Stories to Survive

By Mariam Durrani

…for myself, my family, and colleagues. So I’ve been trying to draft a short 800-word article for Religion Dispatches, as my attempt to make sense of this current moment, not because I chose this as an anthropological project, but here I am. Here I am listening to Trump’s transition team drop words like Muslim registry or that there is a precedent for internment camps in American history. The news that the KKK has been dropping their newsletter off…

Burying the Future: Youth Violence in Chicago

By Ibrahim Abusharif

[Derrion Jones, a sixteen-year-old honor student, was beaten to death on his way home from school in Chicago—a city which has suffered the violent deaths of 34 school-age children in the past year. Attention to this tragic incident has reached through city and state government to the Obama White House. In the wake of recent events, Ibrahim Abusharif reflects on the toll of youth violence.] It’s a small grace of life that people with winsome proje…

Religious Right Targets Obama Picks, Daschle and Holder

By Bill Berkowitz

…ster appointment, the opposite of a national protector of health and human services,” Jill Stanek, the head of BornAliveTruth, the anti-abortion group that ran advertisements against Obama during the election, told the Catholic News Agency. “Daschle ardently supports abortion … and he disdains abstinence education. The only reason Obama appointed Daschle was to assure Obama’s radical support of the abortion industry would be extended through HHS.”…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…opulation is overwhelmingly South Asian, especially in Dubai—they form the service and labor class, but many South Asians are wealthy professionals and businesspersons. Dubai and the UAE have historically been more a part of the Indian Ocean economy than the Arab world, which is barely a coherent economic concept (countries like Turkey belong as much to Eastern Europe as the Middle East; the Gulf more to India and East Asia than to Arab and Berber…

Play to Extinction: Religious Groups Unite Against Predatory Gambling

By Frederick Clarkson

…s were legal in two states in 1985 (Nevada and New Jersey). Today there are 800,000 machines in 40 states. The new generation of electronic “slots” do not even use coins. You purchase and swipe an electronic card like you do at the ATM. The addictive nature of the electronic slots and their role as the main revenue stream of the gambling industry is not widely understood. Industry data show that 70-80% of the revenue of casinos come from these mac…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…lm as well? I had a small pocket camcorder and took a few shots of worship services. When I was showing them to my dad when I was back in Minnesota for Christmas, he couldn’t believe how awful the conditions in the prison were. The thing that also struck both of us was the urgency and intensity of the worship. Film was able to capture emotion in a different way than I was able to by just writing about it. I also wanted to counter some of the inher…