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US Offers Help For Investigation of Bangladesh Killings

By Peter Montgomery

…ance…” Now Warsame organizes underground meet ups for closeted LGBTQI Muslims. “The idea is to make avenues and paths for other young queer Muslims to live their lives to the fullest and to hold on to their spirituality,” he says. “My intentions are to try to make a difference in Muslim homes.” Peru: Presidential candidate flip-flops, tells Christian activists she would oppose civil unions Presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the dis…

Sometimes Salvation Looks Like Rage: An Open Letter to “Non-denominational” Churches

By Yazmine Nichols

…rchgoers put it, “avoid the stigma of Christianity.” Instead of calling themselves Christians, many evangelicals call themselves disciples—an attempt to more closely replicate the first-century church. The purpose of this language is two-fold. First, it distances the non-denominational/evangelical church from historical moments of crisis such as the Crusades; and second, it is thought to bring its subjects closer to Jesus. The word “disciple” is s…

Secularist Activists Are Being Murdered in Bangladesh: An Ongoing Crisis Causes Many to Flee

By Michael De Dora

…and prevent these crimes, and even engaging in victim-blaming—leaving victims, their families, and other threatened individuals to fend for themselves. News reports may create the impression they are stuck. However, behind the scenes there has been an exodus of threatened intellectuals and activists from the country. Freethought Under Attack My own organization, the Center for Inquiry, has worked with threatened individuals in Bangladesh since Apr…

Emanuel’s Pulse: A Plea for Black Church–LGBTIQ Solidarity

By J. Kameron Carter

Early Sunday morning I woke up, my phone abuzz with news. Reading about the shooting in Orlando, worry and fright overcame me. Still in a semi-wake, semi-sleep, semi-dream state, I thought it was Charleston all over again. Emanuel AME redux. My partner saw my face and asked what had happened. We turned on the television to learn that a man named Omar Mateen had entered a popular gay nightclub on its “Latin Night.” Using an AR-15 assault rifle and…

Sacred Geography: A Queer Latino Theological Response to Orlando

By Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez

…n bed on Sunday morning, reading the news about the Orlando shooting on my phone. In the wake of the tragedy, I have found myself mostly at a loss for words, stuttering between anger and sadness. I can not fully describe what I was feeling and thinking that morning as I was getting ready to head over to the LA Pride parade—even as news came in of an arrest in Santa Monica, earlier in the day, of a heavily armed man who was supposedly en route to t…

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ntroversial. I don’t like being controversial. I get abused a lot in mail, phone calls and that sort of thing. I don’t enjoy that. But, if you are controversial in the public arena, the people who have given up on Christianity say, “My God, there must be something more to this story than I realized.” So, being controversial is my doorway to the generation of my own children. “The primary issue in the Christian church today is to get away from orig…

Terror In South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…ow what happened to Walter Scott is because a bystander filmed it with his phone. In making his plea, Pinckney invoked the biblical story of Doubting Thomas, the one of Jesus’s disciples who would not believe Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw him with his own eyes and touched his wounds with his own hands. “It was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe,’” Pinckney said of Thomas. Some people, said Pinckney, are like Thomas…

Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…ddressing of everything. My own take on your book is that you multiply the number of psychological motivations we can associate with religion, and so you’re offering a much better, more useful set of motivations than the previous theorists of religion whom you’ve mentioned. Where I’m hesitant is that you claim you’ve found a set of psychological universals, and here’s my reason: we know that culture affects biology, that there’s a give-and-take be…

The Fragility of Our Reality: A Conversation with the Brain Behind PBS Miniseries on Neuroscience

By Michael Schulson

…offers is the closeup. “Okay, we absorb [knowledge] into our nervous systems, but boy, our nervous systems are fragile, and when they change a little bit, the identity changes with them.” In the show, you emphasize the degree to which our experiences of reality are constructed inside our heads. But there are also these cultural or external ways to organize reality, too. Einstein said that theory determines what we can see. What he meant, of cours…

Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…icides of the Heaven’s Gate group. When 39 members of this group killed themselves—claiming that their consciousnesses would be transported to a spaceship, which they believe may have been hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet—the media hyped this incident as “the worst mass suicide in U.S. history” (not counting Jonestown, which occurred in Guyana). Funny stuff, right? Satire about religion is a double-edged sword. American popular culture has long b…