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Religious Freedom Manifesto Calls for Compromise and Civility—What’s So Wrong With That?

By Frederick Clarkson

…n the big day finally arrived, two of the signatories, Charles Haynes and Oliver Thomas, announced the Charter in an op-ed in USA Today. The piece followed the Charter formula, including uplifting prose about what the Framers of the Constitution and the First Amendment intended about religious freedom, what it has meant in our history, and might mean for our future. But they make the same error as the Charter: They paraphrased the language of the…

What American Flag-Worship Looks Like to a New Citizen

By Rosalind C. Hughes

…telling liturgical response from the gathered congregation was a chant of “USA! USA!” Indeed. Three weeks after I first moved to the United States with my family, and one week into our American public school adventures, my youngest daughter asked me, “Mummy, did you know that we pray to the flag every morning at school?” Any discussion of an American “civil religion” needs to take account not only of history and of ideology, but of the religious r…

Archbishop Boots LGBT Catholics from Philly Church

By Patricia Miller

…of Dignity USA, told RD. The Equally Blessed Coalition, which consists of New Ways Ministry, Dignity USA, Fortunate Families and Call to Action, had a program called “TransForming Love: Exploring Gender Identity From Catholic Perspectives” scheduled for September 25 which reportedly caused Chaput to cancel the group’s permission to use the space. “Unfortunately, this is yet another instance of the kind of exclusion LGBT Catholics and supporters h…

RD10Q: Living Without God

By Ronald Aronson

…arked your interest? I slowly began to realize that despite the stream of “New Atheist” books, most atheists, agnostics, and secularists still lacked confidence in their worldview and many of those I talked to confessed to still being at a loss when arguing with sophisticated religious believers. The forceful arguments of Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens against God and religion still left people without answers to a very different question: how do w…

Science of Little Help with Personhood Issues

By Paul Wallace

…e less willing we are to let our (non-scientific) moral and religious traditions speak. I am not one to insist that morality requires religious belief, but I have a hard time seeing how any morally serious worldview can persist without some kind of appeal to ultimate things. And so long as science remains the sole arbiter of ultimate things, our public moral lives will remain impoverished….

A Religion Scholar Gets It Wrong on Indiana’s RFRA

By Danny Fisher

…ll RFRAs are created equal,” as Aaron Weaver wrote recently for a Religion News Service blog: “If [SB 101’s] conservative champions were truth tellers and not trading in deception trying to pretend the Indiana RFRA is the same as the federal RFRA, they’d acknowledge that the goal is not to restore a long-standing religious freedom standard, but to rig the process to better ensure a desired result — a result that most recognize as discrimination.”…

The Top 10 (Non-Religious) Religious Films of 2017

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…eating mythologies about ending worlds, and some do it better than others. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott called the original Blade Runner a “sacred text,” and its cult following (see pick #8, below) provoked all manner of Talmudic midrash. In this sequel, Denis Villeneuve (of Arrival fame) applies his characteristic deep sounds, elliptical stories, and internal-spiritual searches externally projected. Ridley Scott’s vivid visuals from the…

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

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…omen in a women’s group. My book on trauma Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World has sexual violence at its center, primarily as it impacts women’s lives. And my day-to-day work at Union has included, among other things, empowering women’s voices in interfaith work, which has been so dominated by men. Elaine Howard Ecklund: At the beginning of my career, I did not much feel that my gender was that influential. I am at a different period n…

Religious Traditionalists Resist Marriage Equality, Artist Questions What Is “Un-African” & More in This Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…istribution of Disney’s new “Beauty and the Beast” movie based on what the New York Times describes as “a seconds-long glimpse of a gay character near the end of the movie dancing with the object of his affections.” Milonov’s letter to the Russian Culture Ministry blasts the “obvious, blatant, shameless propaganda of sin, of perverted sexual relations.” More from the Times’ Ivan Nechepurenko: Fighting homosexuality has been a recurrent theme for M…

Capricology: Divine Madness

By Salman Hameed

…’t help but think about 9/11, when memorials and notes cropped up all over New York City as people waited, and hoped for word about their loved ones. The pain on Amanda’s face was very much like what happened to people who grieved again once the memorials were taken down some time after 9/11. With laws being enacted about roadside memorials and the like, I thought this was a interesting way to draw the audience into this week’s story, as well as p…