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The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…e 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 questions. “Are you voting for Hillary/Sanders or Rubio/Christie next week?” is a straightforward question. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are fuzzy. They’re dynamic a…

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…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ldless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are named chairs in universities. The number of women in the sociology of religion who hold tenure track jobs, earn tenure, get published, and get cited is not changing as fast as we would expect, giving that we are seeing gender parity in terms of who earns a graduate degree. There are conver…

“Paleo” is More Than a Fad Diet: Boyd Eaton’s Plan to Return to Eden

By Michael Schulson

…l, and I think they’re basically doing good for the world. I myself have always been more interested in it in an ideological or academic way. I want to find out more and more about how people lived and how that relates to how we live now. To me it’s an intellectual exercise. It does seem to fit into these other intellectual currents, going back to the story of the Garden of Eden. What do we lose when we leave a lifestyle behind? What do we lose wh…

Angry Voters, Right-Wing Populism, & Racial Violence: People of Faith Can Help Break the Linkages

By Chip Berlet

…e supremacist movements.” I catch up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among fam…

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t: The Problem of the Rape Exception

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…en it comes to a subject as contentious as abortion rights, there almost always is—judges will look to the committee report as evidence of congressional intent, and use it to decide what the law actually means. In this case, the committee report for H.R. 3 says that the bill will “not allow the Federal Government to subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape.” Wow. Well, how to make sense of this? I can think of a few possible angles: The LO…

Kendrick Lamar’s Hip-Hop Jeremiad

By Josiah Daniels

…d into a pit of flames and burned to coal Drowned inside the lake outside away you flow And that means the world to me Watch you when you walk inside your house You threw your briefcase all on the couch I plan on creeping through your fuckin’ door and blowin’ out Every piece of your brain until… Dispassionate prayer won’t do, a sermon from the preacher-man won’t do, another worship chorus won’t do! Only the most base and primal words can be uttere…

Pope’s ‘Joy of Love’ Brings Little Joy To LGBT Catholics; Gay Atheist Malaysian Granted Refugee Status In Canada; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s right in front of us, difference is on our iPads, in our laptops, in our phones. We hold a whole world of difference every time we open a phone. And the response to in the world around is at best insult, and so often violence, a reality which is the living experience of many you here. Welby also addressed a January gathering of Primates, which voted to suspend the Episcopal Church from questions on doctrine or policy for three years because of i…

Electionpocalypse, Part I (Christianity)

By Sarah Posner

…nting boys with long hair at Cranbrook, and his Church was still 15 years away from lifting its ban on black men serving in the priesthood. Romney was still nearly half a century away from pronouncing his contempt for the 47% at a Boca Raton fundraiser, which, when you think about it, is kind of like King’s last speech to the Memphis sanitation workers, right? Pastor Robert Jeffress, who just a year ago endorsed Rick Perry over Romney in the Repub…