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Ugandan Bishops Push Notorious Anti-Gay Bill

By Peter Montgomery

…d that the death penalty would be removed in committee. “However,” notes a commentary on Care2.com, “readers familiar with the legislation’s history will know that such assurances have been made before only for the bill to go to the voting stage intact and without the death sentence deleted.” Also still in the bill: A 7-year jail sentence for consenting adults who have gay sex; A life sentence for people in same-sex marriages; Extradition and pros…

The Internets Own Your Religion

By Hussein Rashid

…onolith, and there is no universally recognized religious leadership, it becomes hard for someone to come forward to act as a gatekeeper. Even if there were Catholic-style hierarchy, you can imagine the type of games that could be played with granting access to use of the domain. For example, would nuns invested in social justice be allowed to register under “.catholic”? In the case of Muslims, we don’t know who is registering these gTLD and to w…

Neither The Joker Nor Godlessness Drove Batman Shooting

By Jeffrey Scholes

…the University of Colorado. Or he must have had a rough upbringing. Or the common refrain: he’s simply psychotic, and no verifiable reason for the shooting will ever be discovered. The responses from religious commentators, scholars, and pastors have a similar range. Shootings like this will continue because of our increasing desensitization to violent images, one Patheos blogger argued, while another evangelical commentator believes that this act…

Masculinity and Mass Violence: When Will We Acknowledge the Smoking Gendered Pronoun Hiding in Plain Sight?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…pted me to tweet my own discomfort on the morning of the Oak Creek attack: https://twitter.com/edrescherphd/status/232208487675994112 The common denominator Others have seen religious intolerance as a central feature in many recent mass killings. Mark Juergensmeyer recently discussed the ways in which certain religious narratives meld seamlessly with notions of violence and war. The image of cosmic, religious war, he notes, can been seen at the ce…

Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

By Chris Stedman

…ic minorities is accessible—these issues impact many people in the atheist community. But what about people in other communities? If this is the case, then interfaith outreach and cooperation is imperative as it strives to decrease the distance between “others” and create opportunities for people to identify shared values and a sense of shared humanity—an understanding of identity that allows people to see another’s freedom and value as connected…

Christian Media Battle Over Controversial Figure

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…tion.” “The reasons for that were multi-fold,” he says, “but they were not compelling… not reasons that would have led us to postpone or kill the story.” Repeated requests for comment from the Christian Post went unanswered, though I was eventually informed that the Post’s editor, Michelle Vu, who authored the August 17 response, had “politely decline[d]” my request. Instead, I was provided with a brief statement: “Christianity Today wrote an art…

5 Take-Aways from the Newly Viral Romney End-Times Video

By Joanna Brooks

…n agenda interrogate what it really means to be Mormon. Mormon doctrine is complex and there have been subtle shifts in emphasis over time. Recently, I heard a top Mormon historian compare doctrine to a cloud: there are some fairly central points of Mormon belief and lots of more marginal ones. But the faith is actually more about orthopraxy than orthodoxy—living as an observant Mormon, showing up on Sundays, doing your Church-assigned job (since…

Prosperity Gospel and Foreclosure

By Sarah Posner

…tell the operator it’s the Passover offering, and “prosperity is going to come into your life, . . . and everything that has been stolen from you will be given back.” In TBN’s world, God is not compassionate to the poor, only to the faithful, and their faithfulness is measured by their offering. It doesn’t matter if the audience might need their money for the rent, for medicine, for food. Munsey says—to nods and murmurs of affirmation—that God is…

History Channel’s The Bible Keeps Conservatives (Mostly) Happy and Jesus White

By Paul Harvey

…some seen in loincloths. With a lineup like that, and with Christianmingle.com (a Christian dating site in the wake of some bad press), being a primary sponsor of the show, the audience seems clear, and the first night’s ratings were pretty good, if not off the charts. But so far the effect is far murkier than the intent, as I will detail in future posts. Thus far, the show appears to take too many liberties with the text to satisfy the most bibl…

Atheist Islamophobia… Again

By Kate Blanchard

…icle by Frans De Waal that seeks to understand why “Militant Atheism Has Become a Religion” seems relevant here. As an Emory psychology professor who conducts research on primate behavior, and an atheist himself, his criticism is directed neither at atheists nor Muslims. Instead he writes, “I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se.” Dogmatists “are poor listeners” who “pound their drums so hard that they can’t hear one anothe…