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Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

By Peter Laarman

…ady—to a shared expectation that the End is near and that the End will be scary. Paul shares something of this same End Times consciousness; he clearly expects Christ to return in his own lifetime, although for him the expectation is less frightening than reassuring. For Christians of a literalist persuasion, the End Times can be delayed but never denied. Thus there have been, at various intervals, moments of heightened expectation and frenzy. AD…

“Godly Or Bad?”: The Return of Ted Haggard

By J. Terry Todd

…There, she found Ted at the nadir of his professional life, moving between cheap motels with his wife Gayle and two of their five children as he went door-to-door, selling life insurance to strangers. From the pinnacle of evangelical leadership to this? Pelosi later told an interviewer that the story of Haggard’s exile was too compelling in its complexity to pass up. How the mighty had fallen! She brought along her camera, and the Trials of Ted Ha…

Who Is “Sam Bacile?”

By Sarah Posner

…d that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video’s purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula’s address. —- For more RD coverage of the events in Libya see “Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuses,” by Haroon Moghul — ed….

Death Penalty, Debated (Dedicated to the Memory of Sarah Horowitz)

By Bill Berkowitz

…penalty in Texas,” said TCADP Executive Director Kristin Houle. “The state carried out a ‘typical’ number of executions in a record amount of time—averaging nearly one per week over a five-month period. Yet officials’ zeal for executions was not matched by public desire for new death sentences, as evidenced by the continued steep decline in the number of new inmates arriving on death row.” TCADP also pointed to some hard-earned victories over the…

Conservative Bishops Unhappy At Synod, But Ignore Walkout Call; Australian Religious Leaders Step Up Marriage Equality Opposition; Italy Debates Civil Unions; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ong after, the former acquaintance called to threaten Subhi from a Turkish phone number. Power noted that Subhi spoke at a recent UN Security Council Session, the first-ever dedicated to LGBT rights, which she said was an important precedent to set: But also, it allowed us to convey, in a single voice, and with the authority of the Security Council – which is the premiere global enforcement body for peace and security – it allowed us to convey tha…

South Asian Religious Leaders Challenged to Take on Stigma and Discrimination: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…who inject drugs, encounter formidable barriers to accessing vital health care, including HIV and STI prevention, care and support services. “Religious leaders can, if they want, do so much to help remove stigma and discrimination against our communities and sensitize society as a whole,” said Shale Ahmed, Executive Director of Bandhu Social Welfare Society (BSWS). “Faith-based organizations should actively reach out to those who are most vulnera…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…oing or how high over a rushing river we seemed to be slung, I counted red cars, blue cars, white cars; trucks, station wagons, sedans; light posts, fence posts, sign posts; and so on. So it is that I learned this at an early age: numbers make us comfortable. They create the illusion that we understand something meaningful about the reality through which we are moving even as they distract us from the mysterious, often hidden, mechanisms propelli…

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

By Jay Michaelson

…to a fight in a bar, or behaves inappropriately with women, or commits any number of minor sins which ordinary people get away with every day—he lets down not only himself and his family, but his faith community and the Asian-American (and to some extent Asian) community as a whole, which currently views him as a hero. Can you imagine the pressure? And yet, so far at least, neither Tebow nor Lin has fallen. No crashed cars at three a.m., no extram…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…pon producing a majority of valid worker signatures on union authorization cards: i.e., the “card-check” method, against the more traditional practice of petitioning for an NLRB-supervised secret ballot election. This, needless to say, is the provision that has the employers foaming at the mouth. They have already spent millions—and will spend millions more—on misleading print and TV ads asserting that if secret ballots were good enough to elect O…