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Are Atheists The New Campus Crusaders?

By Katherine Don

…as a nonprofit in 2001. By 2007, 80 campus groups had affiliated with them, 100 by 2008, 174 by 2009, and today there are 394 SSA student groups on campuses across the country. “We have been seeing rapid growth in the past couple of years, and it shows no sign of slowing down,” says Jesse Galef, communications director at SSA. “It used to be that we would go to campuses and encourage students to pass out flyers. Now, the students are coming to us…

Muslims Murder, Christians Don’t: What Went Missing in Analysis of Tiller’s Executioner

By Dan Mathewson

…s regarding the motives for murder apparently do not linger around the June 1 killing of an army recruiter, Private William A. Long, in Little Rock, Arkansas. The June 2 headline in the Times purports to give the “Report of Motive in Recruiter Attack,” and introduces the alleged killer, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, as “an American convert to Islam.” Details of Muhammad’s connection to Islam punctuate the article: he converted to Islam several year…

Stop the Coup 2025 Founder on the Dangers of the Heritage Foundation’s Authoritarian Playbook

By Daniel Schultz

…s what they’re working on. They think they’re gonna end up in five years or 10 years or 15 years with a stronger democracy but at a high, high cost. This is again where faith communities come in, which is the critical work of talking about the fact that, no, we don’t have a perfect democracy. Our democracy is broken in that sense. It doesn’t deliver to everyone. We have inequity. But there’s a difference between trying to build from a place where…

Muslims Helped Legitimize Lowes’ Decision to Pull Ads From All-American Muslim

By Hussein Rashid

…did this fringe Christianist group, the Florida Family Association, really manage to dominate the media narrative through politically correct surrogates who would not acknowledge FFA’s sinister anti-First Amendment agenda? Amazingly not. It seems that the greatest critics of the show have been other Muslims. I think there are valid critiques one can make of the show. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer made some wonderful observations here on RD, but she also rec…

Why Are We Drawn to Horror?

By Mathias Clasen

…use stories of all time. Or one of Robert McCammon’s horror novels from the 1980s, maybe The Wolf’s Hour or Mystery Walk. I’m currently reading my way through his oeuvre. McCammon’s horror writing is brilliant—evocative and touching and sometimes deeply disturbing, sometimes utterly awe-inspiring. I would’ve loved to have included an interpretive chapter on one of his novels. Maybe in another book. Image from promotional materials for The Cabin in…

Contraception Furor v. Catholic Realities

By Mary E. Hunt

…en’s reproductive health, something the Roman Catholic Church has tried to manage for millennia. The demand for widespread religious exemptions from a common sense policy that makes coverage of contraception part of a national health care package causes most people to scratch their heads. Why in 2012 would anyone resist birth control? Why would a church that opposes abortion not want people to use effective, economical ways of preventing unwanted…

What the Catholic Supreme Court Justices Get Wrong About Marriage

By Patricia Miller

…sh city of Ely, some 70 percent of marriages were still private in the late 1300s. Only with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) “did the Catholic Church finally manage to impose its authority in this sphere by invalidating marriages that had not been performed in public before a parish priest.” So the modern, Western form of marriage as a public union that must be solemnized by an ecclesiastical—or, later, a civil—official that the justices are so w…

What’s Ahead in the World of Mormonism for 2011

By Joanna Brooks

…p on how to handle isues of gender and sexuality. Grizzly bears were stage managed. And I predict there will be more stage managing of grizzly bears to come as Mormonism attempts to redefine itself away from the sometimes ferocious conservatism of its multigenerational, intermountain West ethnic traditional core and towards its future as a twenty-first century global religion. State Senator Russell Pearce (R-AZ), author of the infamous anti-immigr…

Douthat’s Wager: Go to Church, Even If You Don’t Believe

By Jonathan Malesic

…for a more organized, social complement to individualistic and consumerist spirituality that is currently in favor. Andrea Jain and Arielle Levites have recently made the case in Religion Dispatches that spiritual-but-not-religious liberals who want to resist the Trump agenda will need more than yoga, composting, and the occasional online donation to be effective. Self-improvement is a worthy aim, but as Jain says, the political reality of the day…

New LDS Handbook Cements Anti-Trans Policy—And it Doesn’t Make a Whole Lot of Sense

By Kelli D. Potter

…se gender is also supposed to be “eternal” and a feature of our pre-mortal spirit. Presumably we don’t have spiritual chromosomes—so how can a spirit be biological? Of course, they had to make this clarification because, prior to making it, the Proclamation was clearly consistent with the common transgender narrative that there is a gender mismatch between one’s soul/spirit and one’s body. In fact, the Proclamation seems to beg for the possibility…