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My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

By Kathryn Joyce

…llow unassisted childbirthers. Balizet, a former nurse and the author of a number of books on Christian home-living, motherhood, and home birthing, represents a fringe expression of the Quiverfull suspicion of mainstream, institutional experts. She condemns banks, public schools, “statist” government, and denominational churches, but she saves her harshest judgment for institutional medicine: a bastion of pagan religion, where doctors serve as “hi…

RD News Round-Up: October 27, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…groups on Israeli-Palestinian issues. In addition, he was the author of a number of books, the latest of which urged the United States to get muscular with Iran. In February, after being courted by Team McCain for more than in year, Hagee endorsed Sen. John McCain for the presidency. Then Talk2Action’s Bruce Wilson got busy. He delved into the pastor’s sermons, his writing and public commentaries. Wilson found that Hagee’s sermons were riddled wi…

Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

By The Editors

…uman experience. So here, without further preamble, RD’s picks for the Ten Best of 2008’s Religion Top Ten lists. 1.) By now, everyone has seen TIME MAGAZINE’S TOP TEN RELIGION STORIES FOR 2008 by the wise and learned Dave Van Biema. The top story, per Van Biema, is the fact that we’re all going to the poorhouse. In other words the top religion story is that it was not religion, in the end, that decided the presidential election. (Patting ourselve…

Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…and justice officers.” Prison Fellowship Ministries, according to its Web site, is the “largest prison ministry in the world,” and “partners with thousands of churches and tens of thousands of volunteers.” One conservative reader irked by the column’s questioning of Colson’s fitness for a PCM, wrote: “Oh, please. Hope you never need redemption.” How are we to understand the concept of redemption? Of the five definitions in the American Heritage D…

The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

By Andrew Aghapour

…fear that technology might one day surpass us, the human form isn’t always best for the job. Take, for example, the synth telephone operator. Why create a physical robot for this job which has to receive audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribu…

Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and Pro-Home Birth

By Katherine Don

…omen of all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds should have access to the best in reproductive health care, whether that means a safe abortion or the right to quality childbirth care in hospital, clinic, or home environment. The recent onslaught of feticide laws and personhood bills at the state level has made the connection between anti-choice legislation and birthing rights palpable, as even women who do not plan to have an abortion have been i…

Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ldless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are named chairs in universities. The number of women in the sociology of religion who hold tenure track jobs, earn tenure, get published, and get cited is not changing as fast as we would expect, giving that we are seeing gender parity in terms of who earns a graduate degree. There are conver…

As New Poll Finds “Increased Xenophobic Streak,” Republicans Heighten Anti-Muslim Rhetoric

By Sarah Posner

…other groups,” the report notes, “with majorities believing that America’s best days are behind us (60% and 55%, respectively).” But majorities of Americans affiliated with other religious groups, including non-Christian religions, Catholics, black Protestants, and the unaffiliated “all believe America’s best days are ahead of us.” Jones called the pessimism/optimism gap a “deep cultural divide,” associated with a perceived decline in the influenc…

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

By Jay Michaelson

…That is a powerful lesson for all of us, religious or not. Faith is at its best when it helps people be better people, whether in terms of kindness, or humility, or following their dreams, or any number of other positive values—just as it’s at its worst when it takes agency away. The particular myths that Tebow or Lin happen to believe in are secondary (and of course, I mean ‘myths’ in the sophisticated sense of stories that give meaning to human…