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Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…a judgment on the group’s challenge to the registrar’s decision on November 14. Mozambique: LGBT Group Fighting for Legal Recognition Lambda, an LGBT group in Mozambique is also protesting the refusal of the Justice Ministry to register it as an association. The group took out a full-page ad in the Maputo daily paper this month protesting its treatment. In its advertisement, Lambda pointed out that, under the current laws, any group of ten or more…

HitchBot Meets His Maker: What a Robot’s Murder Tells Us About Ourselves

By Michael Schulson

…sad about hitchBOT? Is it just a cultural thing—a xenophobic fear of smartphone-wielding strangers, versus a comfort with cuddly robo-travelers? What tools do we have to navigate the line between a creepy robot-human interaction, and an adorable one? These questions aren’t strictly academic. From the Microsoft paperclip to Siri, millions of people interact daily with human-mimicking computer programs. Earlier this summer, Aldebaran, a French robo…

Don’t Call it a Turkish Spring

By Haroon Moghul

…art of the recent protests. For Ataturk, a Turkish Republic was not enough. 1923. Year Zero, or a fresh start, depending on your take. New dress. New calendar. New mode of government. Ataturk even gave the new, secular republic a new script, ditching Arabic for utilitarian Latin, then erasing as much evidence of Persian and Arabic as he could. Going through the dictionary with a black highlighter. Even snipping out subversive letters. There is, f…

Junior Falwell Unmasked Conservatism; Let’s Thank Him For It

By John Stoehr

…n, as conservatives have alleged since Strom Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat in 1948, calling for a county to secede from a state is traitorous. If “states’ rights” are as sacred as conservatives have said they are, the idea of secession is an abomination. In saying counties should leave the state as casually as ordering unsweet tea with his burger and fries, the Rev. Falwell told us without knowing he was telling us that conservatism in theory is aut…

Introducing The Cubit, RD’s New Religion & Science Portal

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…on the length between the elbow and the tip of the middle finger. Ancient China, ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, and other cultures independently made the forearm a standard of measure. And why not? It’s convenient and ubiquitous. When you lift a hammer, it’s already sitting at the end of a cubit. We chose this humble unit for two reasons. First, the cubit is an intersection; it’s where the human body meets the material world. In the Bible, it’s…

GMO or No: Problematic Intersections of Religion, Biotechnology, and Food

By Brittany Shoot

…o That You May Do No Harm: Changing Attitudes Toward Food in Late Imperial China.” While Chinese food policy affects a significant percentage of the world population, it seems problematic to present “Chinese food culture” as a monolithic way of life. The piece looks at concepts like the five elements and yin-yang but lacks a specific spiritual context I expected from the piece. The focus of Ping-chen’s writing is not on spiritual food ritual but o…

11 Top RD Stories of the Year: Because in 2020 Religion Went to 11

By The Editors

…Racism, Samuel L. Perry, Andrew L. Whitehead, and Joseph O. Baker On March 10, President Trump retweeted a post from conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, who referred to the coronavirus (COVID-19) as the “China Virus.“ Kirk also exclaimed in his tweet, “Now, more than ever, we need the wall…the US stands a chance if we can get control of our borders.” Trump retweeted this and added the comment, “Going up fast. We need… READ MORE Go to…

The Legacy of Bush, Gambler of Other People’s Fortunes, Is Still With Us

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…we earned, paid our debts. In the twentieth century, starting first in the 1920s, we became more Russian in outlook, taking greater risks, running up large debts, spending ourselves into the unseemly position of being the world’s greatest debtor nation. This little story thus take on a sinister meaning, one that puts the period to Bush’s career. It was also hard not to think of this story during President Obama’s recent travels. Bush had a blind…

American Horror Story: Hotel and Monotheism’s Dirty Little Secrets

By W. Scott Poole

…Mucalinda sheltered Gautama during his awakening under the bodhi tree. In China, dragons became, not beasts to be slain, but embodiments of Tian/T’ien, the very balance that brought cosmic harmony to the universe. Such concepts are mostly unknown to Western European and West Asian monotheisms. Monotheism exhibits a peculiar talent for creating monsters of moral degeneracy, horrors of perversity. The idea of one God creates irresolvable tensions,…

10 Noteworthy Yoga Developments to Recall in 2015

By Andrea R. Jain

…ech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 2014, Narendra Modi called for June 21 to serve as International Yoga Day. Nearly two hundred countries, including the United States, Canada, and China, expressed their support for the proposition, and, on December 11, 2014, the General Assembly approved by consensus a resolution establishing June 21 as International Day of Yoga….