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How to Choose a Tour Company for Your Hajj

By Amina Wadud

…nts than their quota allows. Most Muslim countries have a quota; a limited number of hajjis permitted from that country in any one year. This number is set by hajj authorities in Saudi Arabia, because, in all fairness, there has to be a cap on how many Muslims converge on the place. Right now, it stands at around 3 million! Countries with large populations of Muslims have many more applicants than their allotted number of pilgrims. This means you…

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

…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 past year, particularly…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…o Nazis and Communists. Last week British official released figures on the number of same-sex couples who got married between March 29 – the first day marriage was legally available in England and Wales, and June 30. Of the 1,409 marriages, 56 percent were to female couples. According to Gay Star News, about 120,000 people are in civil partnerships, which they will be able to convert to marriages beginning in December. Costa Rica: Survey Shows Spl…

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

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…

Of Sports and Social Justice: An Interview with Rebecca Alpert

By Susan Henking

…ty a better place. I am proud to belong to a synagogue, Mishkan Shalom, in Philadelphia that exemplifies those values. In that book, there is an essay of yours that talks about the need for perspective, whether it’s from the margins or from the center. Is that still a useful way of thinking? I no longer think in those terms. It’s counterproductive (and inaccurate) to imagine ourselves as marginal, or to imagine some mythic center we’d like to chal…

Pro-Life Org Sued for Sexual Abuse During Exorcism

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…whom. A point of comparison might be the now-infamous Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia physician who allegedly performed abortions under fraudulent and negligently unsafe conditions, prescribed painkillers illegally, restrained patients against their will, and is now charged with eight counts of murder based on accusations that he killed babies delivered alive. Not that it’s worthwhile to compare the men’s actions—for how does one tally up and we…

Pope, Christian Conservatives Team Up to Promote Patriarchy

By Patricia Miller

…ident of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput. Other attendees, according to Jeremy Hooper of GLADD, included a who’s who anti-same sex marriage activists, including National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown and cofounder Maggie Gallagher, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Princeton University natural law scholar and NOM co-founder Robert George, Alan…

Don’t Let Bigoted Campaigns Sour You to the Revolutionary Idea of Religious Freedom

By Frederick Clarkson

…legislature to enact the Virginia Statute in 1786; to carry its message to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention the following year; and later for it to be included in the First Amendment in 1791. Commemorative proclamations called for by Congress and issued by presidents annually, have been generally true to the spirit of the occasion. That is, until Donald Trump, who’s used the occasion to promote the Christian Right’s idea that religio…