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Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…t yourself, trust me: people in the pews are constantly whipping out their phones in order to look up Bible passages, take notes during sermons, and, perhaps, do other things. Bible apps like YouVersion, which claims close to 200 million downloads, are now a common way to find, say, Matthew 7:5 quickly, instead of having to rifle through a pulp-and-glue book. It’s possible that some people are hypocrites about phone use in church (cf. Matthew 7:5)…

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…

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…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

…e runner-up to Miss Alabama. But beneath the façade, Jennifer was falling apart. The pageant world and the evangelical world demanded that she conform her body, her behavior, her choices and her personality to a certain kind of unrealistic “perfection.” This led to troubling amounts of anxiety and damaging, inequitable relationships. At one point, a boyfriend raped Jennifer, sending her into a tailspin of post-traumatic stress. Part of her felt at…

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…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…ime, polling firms do a lot to manufacture the appearance 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…

Godly Game or Godless Satire? Countering Biblical Ignorance with Heretical Humor

By Betsy Shirley

…Jewish festival-carnival of Purim, and the Hindu ritual of Holi, in which participants throw colored paint at each other, Bado-Fralick and Norris point out that religion and play are often inseparable. Throughout this long history, religious games and toys are “evidence of the ways in which religious institutions and practioners use cultural trends to breathe new life back into their traditions.” Via phone, Norris explained that one of the ways p…

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

By Chrissy Stroop

…other words, regions you’d expect to be highly religious were reported by participants to be so. In addition, “While nonreligious beliefs may be casually accepted in states like California and Vermont, nonreligious people living in states like Mississippi and Utah have markedly different experiences.” “Stigma and Community Religiosity by State” chart is from “Reality Check: Being Nonreligious in America,” courtesy of American Atheists. Indeed, th…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…it on the west side of the state, where the decision will be made. We are participating in a Catholic-to-Catholic phone bank that Washington United for Marriage has set up on Wednesday nights and we assist with the larger phone bank at the Jewish synagogue downtown. A great deal of our work is communicating with Catholics on our email list and Facebook. As a Catholic, how does your faith shape your views on marriage for LGBT people? My faith blos…

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

By Spencer Dew

…hat, like the mute statue to which it is paired, it can be read across the partisan divide, a paean alternately (or simultaneously!) to American’s exceptional greatness as the result of compassion and generosity as well as the result of an economy characterized by opportunity, where the poor of the world will be limited in their achievements only by the will with which they tug at their own bootstraps. And, yes, as Miller would say, both of these…