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Refusing Religion, Claiming the Future: A Roundtable Discussion on “The Nones Are Alright”

By Peter Laarman

…More likely, at least in the U.S., the forces of individualism, choice, a more democratized understanding of authority, broad access to all forms of knowledge (religious and otherwise), and the like, will continue to require religious organizations to adapt and change in response to new ways of thinking and “being” that results from how these cultural patterns develop. Kaya Oakes: I happened to attend church recently with two friends who are Cath…

Trump, Islamophobia, and the Philly Pig’s Head Incident

By David Krueger

…ecord that Allah is a piece of pork shit.” A few weeks later, in the early morning hours of December 7, the mosque manager unlocked the front doors for the early morning fajr prayer. As he was about to enter, he noticed the severed head of a pig lying next to the door on the sidewalk. Pork is considered haram or forbidden in Islam and this is rightly understood as an act of desecration. Philadelphia police are investigating both incidents. The yea…

Reporting from Paris: A Prayer for Polluters

By Donna Schaper

…id, in naming the agenda as moral. No one can speak without using the word moral. Al Gore asks the moral questions this way: What must we do? What can we do? What will we do? His triplet joins the triplet of the prayer. Of course we will have to accept some things that won’t budge. Of course we have to change what we can. And mostly we need the wisdom to know the difference. Listen to my friend, the business-environment journalist Marc Gunther exp…

Oprah, Terrorist Cells, and the Meaning of Life: An Interview with Paul Froese

By Andrew Aghapour

…purpose? You would think that it’s the highly educated, or people who are more cosmopolitan, because they’re confused by all the options, but it’s actually the poorer people in post-industrial countries. And if you compare people in poverty in post-industrial countries to people in poverty in the third world, the former are much more likely to say that they lack purpose. These people probably suffer from an existential relative deprivation. They…

Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…ions 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 between our psychology and our environment. Some of our fundamental desires aren’t just biological, but also…

When Auschwitz Becomes a Poké Stop

By Karen E. Park

…ry. For years now we have been able to escape our physical spaces with our phones. But Pokémon Go doesn’t just allow us to avoid a “real” place in favor of a “virtual” one. It has instead transformed our real spaces into virtual ones. It may have been bad manners to play video games at a cemetery, or to take a selfie at a funeral, but with Pokémon, the funeral, the cemetery, and now even the Holocaust memorial and 9/11 memorial, have become the ga…

The Forgotten Nones: The High Cost of Fleeing Fundamentalist Religion

By Andreea Nica

…here are people out there who will care about you, and build you up. While more and more people are leaving religion, we still don’t know much about individuals who leave fundamentalist, strict religions, and how their coming-out process impacts their well being. The social implications of this phenomenon are important. Religion continues to exert a significant influence on crucial social systems like family and friends, so understanding the impac…

Under Water: Waiting for the Flood (of Awareness) in Louisiana

By Drew Konow

…ssism, sexism, and more—which constantly rank whose lives (and deaths) are more valuable, more “newsworthy,” more profitable for mass distribution. Comparing the newsworthiness of our suffering to that of others is the precise method by which the news devalues the lives of black, brown, poor, immigrant, transgender, and queer people. I am not, in other words, only frustrated by the lack of national news coverage or public awareness of the floods i…

Scolding Those Who Choose Pets But No Children Pope Misses the Rainforest for the Trees

By Sarah A. Bowen

…our humanity… a man or woman who do not develop the sense of fatherhood or motherhood, they are lacking something, something fundamental, something important. Think about this, please.” He struck a chord, and people did think about it. Many, like The Cut’s Mia Mercado, highlighted the irony of a childless man scolding those without children. My phone went wild with calls from animal lovers, queer friends and childless Catholic couples as well. An…

But ‘Natural’ is Better, No? ‘How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science’

By Andrew Aghapour

…e then linked to natural and unnatural forms of contraception. Catholicism most famously talks about this, but I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t just religions—even people who are anti-religion have also embraced the idea that natural contraception (however defined) is good, and unnatural birth control (again, however understood) is bad. And what ends up happening is that people try to shoehorn whatever it is that they want to believe is…