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Expelled: Christian Student Claims Discrimination, But Judge Says No

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…their personal values,” he wrote in a portion of his ruling posted by the Detroit News. “In the case of Ms. Ward, the university determined that she would never change her behavior and would consistently refuse to counsel clients on matters with which she was personally opposed due to her religious beliefs—including homosexual relationships.” Judge Steeh is a Clinton appointee, so I’m sure he’ll be plastered with the “activist judge” label, but h…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…’s version of “fantasy football” here.) And I give them the assignment I always give to my eighteen-year-old students: come up with your own definition of religion, see if you can put it in a sentence, and then give some paragraphs of support to back it up. The assignment has no singular answer, of course; I’m looking for their ability to think coherently and offer support for their ideas. This is something at which Maher and cohorts would mostly…

A Matter of the Heart: Talking to Gay Christian Rocker Jennifer Knapp

By Kristin Rawls

…e I’m no longer an artist who fits their label. They can’t serve me in the way that I need a record company to serve me, and I can’t serve their record label and brand the way I would like to serve their record label and brand. I was 22 or 23 when I first signed with Gotee. I knew that they were going to grow with me. And we were going to be a kind of family, and they really held up their end of that. I can’t say enough about the way they’ve hon…

Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

By Jay Michaelson

…ect kitsch and its quasi-fascistic associations. Feel this way, think this way, act this way—no! It took another several years before I really understood that some people, perhaps most people, never went through this quintessentially sophomoric phase. Oddly, they seemed not to have read Clement Greenberg. They liked Norman Rockwell unironically. They still looked at “abstract” art and said “my pet could do that.” They listened to Richard Marx. Thi…

What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

By Haroon Moghul

…clusion: Looking Forward I am not so dense as to argue that Muslims have always behaved innocently, and that is not the conclusion I want you to walk away with. We have more than enough examples of heinous acts committed by Muslims, sometimes justified in the name of Islam. In fact the first article I wrote for this magazine condemned the Islamic Republic of Iran for the hijacked 2009 election and subsequent crackdown. But I’m arguing that Muslim…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out after zuhr prayer one day. There it was: a whole section with all women in it. Not wanting to get my hopes up too high and then be disappointed (because this was at least 45 minutes after the prayer had ended), I ask the female guard, “al-Nisaa yajuz tusalli hinna?”—are women allowed to pray here? And she said, “yes, this is the wo…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…ng. Of participants, 26.3% reported that sometimes, frequently or almost always “others have rejected, isolated, ignored or avoided me” and 17.3% reported sometimes, frequently, or almost always being excluded from social gatherings and events because of their nonreligious identity. When RD recently spoke with American Atheists’ Gill over the phone, she also noted that her organization and others like it “hear from constituents every day who have…

What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

By Daniel Wise

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

Cloverfield: Sin & Redemption, with Monsters

By Gabriel Mckee

…film decries are redeemed by the monster’s presence—that search for a cell phone charger becomes a selfless quest to save a trapped friend, with dozens of selfless acts along the way. In the midst of judgment, we see glimpses of a New Jerusalem. But the creature is a cleansing fire without which that redemption would be impossible. Ultimately, Cloverfield is a movie about how tragedy can bring us out of ourselves and into a greater community; its…

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

By Spencer Dew

…of religious discourse—in which the statue has an eternal meaning, “has always” meant this, Acosta pleads, citing “what the country has always thought of”) to a drily historical material reading where there is no eternal, united, ideal of America, just differing opinions, shifting policies. Acosta’s question introduced American civil religion to the briefing, to which the Trump administration official shot it down as “ahistorical.” Another fail f…