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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….

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…ations. 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. It’s also barely 2% of the country’s GDP. There…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…t Atheists and Agnostics are not readily blended populations. Finally, the numbers in the Pew report obscure an understanding of American religiosity as it is expressed in practice—that is, as people do religion or spirituality rather than as they believe. While the researchers marked practice in the conventional categories of worship attendance and prayer, other practices that my research has suggested are religiously or spiritually meaningful to…

AIDS Anniversary: Thirty is the New Eternity

By Susan Henking

…ed ribbons reappear here, there, and everywhere, sometimes (as recently in San Francisco) in startlingly huge forms. This year, for the 30th, the Smithsonian is undertaking an exposition. Alongside the NASA: Art (another anniversary linked to endings) and the ongoing celebration/commemoration of the Civil War’s 150th, the American History Museum opened an exhibit on June 3 entitled “Archiving the History of an Epidemic: HIV and AIDS, 1985-2009.” I…

The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

By Andrew Aghapour

…e replaced by a complex automated system like the University of California San Francisco’s robotic pharmacy, which is capable of producing hundreds of thousands of labeled doses of medicine without error. This is part of the growing trend within large-scale manufacturing to replace teams of people with customized, automated systems. As John Markoff recently detailed, robotic arms are now picking the lettuce we eat, operating the grocery distributi…

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

By Alana Massey

…in 250,000—some of whom are going to have problems, big problems—is just insane. We have to be insane. Terrible,” he said at a rally in Beaumont. It was noted that the 250,000 number was seemingly pulled from thin air, a ghastly specter of invasion at a scale larger than most of our cities. There were later comments about poisonous Skittles made by one of his idiotic children. *** Consider the travel ban clearly targeting Muslim-majority countries…

Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…King’s sophomore, Nick Dunn, agrees with Croslow about the need for a historically grounded Christianity, however he emphasizes the liturgical aspects of Roman Catholicism as a motivation for converting. When he moved to New York City to attend The King’s College he had a difficult time finding a church that was similar to his home church in San Diego. The churches that he attended in New York, even the evangelical ones, often were a bit more stru…

Dirty Money in the Appalachian Church: Six Years After Deadly Coal Mine Disaster, Where Are We Now?

By Michael J. Iafrate

…olics in West Virginia have questioned both Bransfield’s personal and diocesan expenditures for years now, but only some information has been made public. Diocesan spokespeople and Catholic Charities officials have stated publicly that the church in West Virginia does draw money from unspecified “fossil fuel investments”—and it is surely significant that one of the four lay members of Bransfield’s finance council has a background as a lobbyist for…

Of God, But Not God: A Methodist Minister Speaks About Church’s Refusal to Open Its Doors to LGBT

By Joel Pitney

…d the country. George Washington Carver was one of those speakers. Being African-American, he was not allowed in the hotel in town so he stayed at my grandparents’ house. Irving Berlin, the Jewish piano player, was not allowed to stay at the hotel because he was Jewish. He stayed with my grandparents. And it was the same for Howard Thurman, the famous African-American theologian. My mother sat on his lap when he stayed with them and he told her st…