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The Real Story Behind Rick Perry’s Secret Meetings with Pastors

By Sarah Posner

…nomination. The group is connected to Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s plan for a large prayer rally in August. Kaylor emailed me yesterday, after reading my post on how Perry’s effort was reminiscent of Robison’s role in mobilizing conservative Christians in support of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000. Kaylor wrote, “You were correct to connect the news about Perry’s phone call with Robison’s effort in 1980. In fact, the connec…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

…in mind. I can name the people who were my imagined audience. I have their numbers in my cell phone. There are, of course, lots of other people I would invite to eavesdrop on this solipsistic soliloquy. I’d like Bataille scholars to read the book. I’d like people who’ve never heard of Bataille to read the book. I’d like feminist and queer theologians—and those scholars who study queer theory—to read it. And if a serious scholar of Bacon’s or Mappl…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…logical engineering to create artificial organs for humans needing a transplant operation, would you say this is making appropriate use of medical advances OR is it taking medical advances too far?” We write about science, religion, and ethics for a living, and neither of us has a concrete answer to this question. Assuming that most participants haven’t already thought this through, the answer they choose after mere seconds of consideration isn’t…

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…

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…

Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…tors are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in support of the bill, right? “Oh, no,” she said. “Against i…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…particularly religious.” Gill, herself a transgender lesbian, noted in our phone conversation that the Secular Survey’s questions about identity concealment were indeed meant to get at “a coming out experience,” though the survey deliberately did not use that language in order to avoid possible confusion. Asked whether she thinks the phrase “coming out” belongs only to the LGBTQ community, Gill remarked, “I would vehemently disagree with that; I t…

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…

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…t survivor, of course, is Aayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who fled to Holland, before landing in the United States. Her husband is the British historian Niall Ferguson (an Oxford-Harvard professor of empire). There are many differences between the two articles and between the two authors. Ghosh is a professional journalist with a commitment to neutral reportage, while Ali is a professional polemicist, an unabashed critic of both the rel…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…icult work. It’s even harder because The Public doesn’t like to answer its phones. Some people are more difficult to reach than others, such that these representative samples may not be so representative. Wuthnow points out that response rates for surveys have been declining steadily over the decades. Today, even a high-quality Pew study is unlikely to get even 25% of its randomly selected households to respond. Some recent Pew reports have reache…