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Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

By Kara Loewentheil

…h ultra-Orthodox men interfering in your travel, you can just take another airline. If only it were as easy for female employees affected by the numerous lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement to find a better job. *Correction: This post originally indicated that gender separation was due to concerns about women’s menstrual cycles. To read more about gender separation among Haredi Jews in Israel and in the U….

The Religious Implications of Nudity

By Steve A. Wiggins

…d it laid out bare for us at church (strictly non-denominational) every Sunday. Among the earliest lessons, from day six, in fact, was that nakedness is shameful and evil. Had not God himself invented durable clothing? He personally slew the animals to cover those bits that Paul called “our uncomely parts.” No one was to see them—and that included the owner—unless absolutely necessary. Showing your privates to a stranger was a sin. Now conservativ…

Penn Jillette’s Signs You May Already Be an Atheist

By Steve A. Wiggins

…rust I have in the TSA before, Jillette’s rant in “Penn’s Bacon and a Kiss Airline” was like finding a long-lost brother; another guy who feels it is criminal to be viewed naked by strangers—involuntarily—is a true freedom fighter. This is a comedian with a conscience. He may come down on the wrong side of many traditional issues (global warming and sexual mores, e.g.), but he is keenly aware that too many people suffer. Theodicy in motion. In the…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…was caught after the murder, fleeing halfway across the state, he had the phone number of an Operation Rescue leader on his dashboard—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broader connections he’d built with anti-abortion extremists. The church, Roeder would later testify, emerged as the only place he could find a shot at Tiller, around the elaborate security measures the doctor had learned to follow at his clinic and home. “Justifiable homicide…

Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

By Lauri Lebo

…alien-smuggling charges and served five years’ probation. His fellow defendant, Sister Darlene Nicgorski, argued for her First Amendment right to practice her religion, saying, “If I am guilty of anything, I am guilty of the gospel.” Today, Fife is pastor emeritus at the church. In 2002, he helped found the Samaritan organization. Worn-Out Soles Both Brother David and Millsap have been participating in these patrols for about five years. We drive…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…places a strong emphasis on individual responsibility. Their political agenda is to free individuals from what they see as the burdensome, even oppressive, control of government by lowering taxes and decreasing government spending and regulation. The cruel irony is that the spill appears to have been caused in part by the lack of tough independent government regulation. Such regulation might have required that a relief well be dug, as is the case…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…of the cross painted on the shields of his warriors. When Constantine’s outnumbered force won a swift victory the next day against Maxentius (acting on divine prophecies of his own), he gave enough of the credit to Jesus that, within a few years, nascent Christianity was on its way to becoming the official cult of the empire. It is common to think of religion as a primitive form of science, one that asks virtually the same questions and plays a co…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…nge the physical world. The fantasy is not much different from that of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, whose spokesmen use elaborate brain-scanning monitors and claim that if “the square root of one percent” of the world’s population transcendentally meditated at once, world peace would be achieved. In the same way, philosophers in the 1600s fell for the Rosicrucian texts—a series of manifestos issued…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…ng beaten and abducted, and of how she still lives in fear. It is understandable, then, why Lobért might consider prostitution a form of slavery and think of all sex work as trafficking. It is understandable, but it is also imprecise. By using and emphasizing these terms, Lobért and her Hookers for Jesus ministry conflate coercion and consent, leaving little room for alternative narratives and divergent circumstances. Growing up in middle-class Am…

NC’s Gay Marriage Ban: “It’s Going to Hurt the Church”

By Nicole Greenfield

…same-old anti-gay Christian perspective is still the easy go-to. “It’s a strange phenomenon,” he told me: “I really do think that in the long run it’s going to hurt the church, and shrink the church in numbers. We’re supposed to be known for our love for one another, and for our compassion, and this is just not it.” Many younger Christian communities around the country would agree with Bakker, and have adopted the kind of positive, inclusive mess…