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Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…blished on September 13, its author is Bobby Ghosh, senior editor for Time International. Then, from the echo chamber, Newsweek followed suit on September 17 with a controversial cover featuring a closeup of two shouting, turbaned, bearded men in a throng of like-minded protesters, under the title: MUSLIM RAGE Its subtitle drew attention to the personal story of its author: HOW I SURVIVED IT HOW WE CAN END IT That survivor, of course, is Aayan Hir…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…and the message, but actually hungry for both. When I spoke to Bell on the phone a couple weeks after the event in Durham, he told me, In some ways what I do is basic pastoring. It’s, you give people an idea, you let them respond to it, you give them another idea….it’s basic spiritual direction. Like the itinerant rabbi, the guru—not to say that I’m a guru—but there’s a long tradition [of that kind of work]. But so many people right now are rethin…

My Lowest Point

By Amina Wadud

…e’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed silent…

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

By Betsy Shirley

…the Old Testament because they’re long and boring…” Here pauses. “Granted, Numbers is like…” “I like Numbers, but anyway…” mumbles Caleb. “The real impetus for the game,” Thomas resumes, “is to get people to engage in Scripture and read stories they’ve never read before. When a concubine is cut up into twelve pieces, that imagery is really offensive. But a lot of people didn’t even know that story existed in the Bible.” I suspect they’re right; re…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

…ould make me happy. Then, of course, there are the people I can name whose numbers aren’t in my cell phone: Murat Aymedir, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Amy Hollywood, Kaja Silverman, Ernst van Alphen, to name a few. Are you hoping to simply inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I certainly hope there’s pleasure to be gained in reading this book. I hope I’ve been able to capture a tiny fraction of the pleasure (or, the ecstasy, which is a…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…he cancer that had crawled across his body, had lain in bed at home with a phone against his ear while my pastor, who had called him from the pulpit, pointed a cordless phone toward the congregation; we all wept and sang him love songs as he lay dying. These are uniquely evangelical experiences that shaped me, that will always be a part of me. I still long for this kind of community—the kind that journeys together through all the peaks and valleys…

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 Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…et of Americans respond to leading questions, posed by strangers, over the phone. But it’s science! Public opinion polling ends up existing in a strange gray space between science and journalism. A Pew report is definitively not a scientific paper: its goal is to serve media outlets, not to advance a body of academic inquiry. It’s not peer-reviewed. Its methods lack the scope and rigor of a formal social science study. That doesn’t make these repo…

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…

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…