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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…

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….

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…

Let There Be Light: Handwritten Draft of King James Bible Reveals Secrets of Its Creation

By Ed Simon

…be discerned in everything from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The brilliance of its language is that it is so simple and yet never simplistic, in keeping with Tyndale’s wish that one day the young boy ploughing the fields would be as knowledgeable as the Pope. With an influence so profound, it’s not surprising that some, such as the members of the fundamentalist “King James Only” movement have endowed the…

Huckabee on Obama vs. “Average Americans”

By Sarah Posner

…s own choosing, of that notorious un-American figure… wait for it… Abraham Lincoln. Huckabee realized later that Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, not Kenya, and despite failing to take on Malzberg’s birtherism on the air, admitted that he knows Obama was born in Hawaii. Here’s Huckabee’s statement, in which he goes on to wonder if Obama is a real American: “Governor Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing…

Ted Haggard on ‘Loveless’ Evangelical Church

By Lauri Lebo

…ory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by holding a religious rally at the Lincoln Memorial; no one is trying to further a conservative political agenda by calling President Obama’s faith a “perversion,” as Glenn Beck said last week: “You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Chris…

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Red/Blue ‘National Divorce’ Looks an Awful Lot Like a Confederate Flag

By Thomas Lecaque and Joshua Call

…e’ve set aside to honor the legacies of both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (an admittedly fraught endeavor, particularly in the case of the slaveholding first president). Because what is “national divorce” but the Second Klan persevering? Hyperbole is nothing new to political discourse, writ broadly. But Greene’s recent remarks, part of a longer Twitter thread, are a stretch, even for the increasingly outlandish rhetoric of right-wing ideo…

Undercover-ed Religion: 13 Stories That Went Missing in 2012

By Peter Laarman

…Note to self: find out whether Spielberg/Kushner are correct about how Mr. Lincoln pronounced the word “righteous” in his Second Inaugural. Meanwhile, take note of the way scholar Jonathan Haidt’s “righteous mind” meme has swept all before it in popular discourse. There’s a variant of the same basic idea in Chris Mooney’s Republican Brain. Both writers wish us to know that America is no immediate danger of slipping into an “anything goes” ethos: w…