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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…

Gay Marriage Opponents Running on Empty

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…. At the first, about a dozen volunteers spent the night making almost 300 phone calls and collecting pledges of volunteer support and contributions from 50 new supporters. Add that to the five other locations holding similar phone banks or collecting post cards of support, and I’m sure we easily got our 300 today. In addition, Equality Maryland hosted an interfaith meeting to mobilize supportive faith leaders. It was so great to see such a wonder…

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…

How Does an Atheist Come to Believe in God?: An Interview with Jacob Needleman

By Lisa Webster

…ills, I fished in my bag for the tiny microphone I planned to use with my iPhone, to record our conversation. “Is that what you’re using?” he asked, with great interest. He held up his own phone. “I just got one of these. Will this really work?” He sat next to me on the couch as I pointed him through the app store on his phone. “There it is,” I said, pointing to iTalk. “That’s what I’m using.” He tapped the screen, but the app that came up for dow…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…ight (judging by comparable Pew polls, the non-response rate was probably around 90%). But the main issue with this survey has to do with the way the central questions were formulated. Most popular polls, like Pew studies, are conducted over the phone using a list of simple multiple choice questions. Many forms of public opinion are accurately predicted this way, including voting behavior, because they are easily distilled into multiple choice que…

Cloverfield: Sin & Redemption, with Monsters

By Gabriel Mckee

…n short, it’s self-absorption: the characters in this film search for cell phone chargers while the world falls down around them. In one key scene (that appears in the trailer), the monster hurls the head of the Statue of Liberty, which crashes down a few feet from the POV camera. Within seconds, people have lined up in front of it to take pictures with their cell phones. They’re distanced from what’s happening around them, oblivious to what it re…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…ce of certainty. In particular, they choose to report statistics as single numbers (for example, Pew recently found that 24% of Jehovah’s Witnesses describe themselves as born-again) rather than as margin-of-error ranges, normalized around a mean (had it taken that margin into account up-front, the Pew study would have reported that 16.8%-31.2% of Jehovah’s Witnesses believe they’re born again; somehow, that sounds less authoritative). It’s also i…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…saulted over their unbelief, although for African-American respondents the number is 2.5%. Meanwhile, 12% of respondents experienced threats of violence, and 2.5% experienced vandalism (14.2% and 3.2%, respectively, for Latinx respondents). None of these facts make the experience of “coming out” as nonreligious the same as coming out as LGBTQ, but they do nonetheless show that disclosing one’s nonreligious identity can be fraught and risky dependi…

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

By Spencer Dew

…ay in national identity, in patriotism, ideals and symbols are at the foreground. Talk about “civil religion” seeks to make sense of the way that idealized narratives of history, articulation of idealized values, the symbols representing and the rituals enacting such ideals are used to make meaning of the project of the state. The nation becomes a community by becoming a set of ideals. Ideals are not the same as policy proposals, and they are cert…

Marriage equality and ‘the end of Catholic Ireland’; Gambian Prez vows to slit gays’ throats; Colombian govt affirms support for marriage and adoption; global LGBT recap

By Peter Montgomery

…people of the Irish Republic described themselves as “Roman Catholic”. The number of atheists and agnostics and diverse other faiths was up too, but Roman Catholics remained the majority. However, it is evident, especially in Dublin, that nominal inscription to a religion is one thing, while actual practice is another. Red C’s survey only confirms what is obvious anecdotally: that a substantial number of Irish people have ditched the religion of t…