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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…

The Problem We All Live With: Bearing Witness, But Never Finding Justice

By Emilie M. Townes

…ngress, enslaved Blacks in a state would be counted as three-fifths of the number of white inhabitants of that state. Enslavement written into our founding document is something we have never fully reckoned with as a nation. And we have been reaping this bad seed of a beginning ever since while trying to ignore the fact that we do not legally, politically, socially, or theologically practice the belief that all lives matter. The murders of Sterlin…

Malawi Catholic Bishops Call For Enforcement of Sodomy Law; Ukrainian Thugs Disrupt Equality Festival Opposed by Orthodox Church; Indonesian Islamists Continue Rhetorical War on LGBTs; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…he Opera Theatre to be banned. The European Court of Human Rights has on a number of occasions found that the likelihood of counter-events does not justify restricting citizens right to peaceful assembly. The regional police also asked for the ban, although it is they who are obliged to protect all citizens exercising their right to gather. Indonesia: Anti-Gay Islamists Continue Rhetorical War On LGBTs Weeks of escalating anti-gay rhetoric in Indo…

The Atheist Encounter with Christianity: A Failure to Disbelieve?

By Paul Wallace

…l I could no longer live with it. Then, one day while I was talking on the phone in a dark room, just like that, I shed my belief in a literal “first couple.” Strangely, I don’t remember who I was talking to or what the conversation was about, but all at once I understood and it felt great. Yet my childhood belief had provided protection for me and had given shape to my understanding of God and even of myself, and what did I have to replace it wit…

The Religious Right’s Apocalyptic Visions of an Obama Presidency

By Bill Berkowitz

…ny time during the day. Gun ownership is outlawed in eight states and “the number is growing with increasing Democratic control of state legislatures and governorships.” Home schooling has been “severely restricted” thanks to the lobbying efforts of the National Education Association. Anonymous points out that although President Obama “expressed strong personal disapproval” of many of the Supreme Court decisions that have brought about these chang…

Report from Paris During COP21: Let Us Not Commit Global Suicide

By Donna Schaper

…et. The Kyoto Protocol, which commits industrialized countries to internationally binding emission reduction targets, was the first climate treaty to emerge from this process. It was passed at COP3 in December 1997 at Kyoto, Japan and came into force in February 2005 when a sufficient number of developed countries signed the agreement; the United States did not, hampering negotiations for the next decade. A successor agreement, involving all count…

It’s Not Raining Eligible Muslim Men

By Shabana Mir

…. Single women who remained single were not unknown, but were not large in number and remained an anomaly. Wealthy and middle-class or educated single women could hold their own. In the diaspora, professional single women, outside of a traditional Muslim context, will inevitably change the face of the community. Traditional, conservative Muslims may have much to fear from these changes, but they must be faced. Growing numbers of Muslim women are m…

Ten Commandments of the Antichrist: The Georgia Guidestones

By Joseph Laycock

…nt and the destruction of national sovereignty and religion. A significant number of Christian dispensationalists subscribe to this view and believe that the New World Order was foretold in the Book of Revelation. In 2005, Mark Dice (using the pseudonym “John Connor” in reference to the Terminator film franchise) organized a Christian group opposed to the New World Order called “The Resistance” and began a campaign to have the monument destroyed….

A Matter of the Heart: Talking to Gay Christian Rocker Jennifer Knapp

By Kristin Rawls

…rts and shows, as well as contributing to these dialogues we’re having. My phone’s ringing off the hook, and I’m participating as much as I can in discussions with LGBT lay people and clergy. There are so many people who want to have a positive dialogue about this. I’m getting to the point that I feel like I can engage at a positive level and contribute to that conversation. So, did you follow the recent change in the Presbyterian Church-USA? Th…