Religion Dispatches
…ted. Only 149 groups existed before Obama was elected in 2008. In 2012 the number had expanded to 1,360. Not all are plotting terrorist attacks, of course. But some are. In September 2012, Daryl Johnson, a terrorist analyst for the US Department of Homeland Security testified before a Senate committee that there was an “upsurge” of potentially violent non-Islamic extremist activity in the United States. So fingers point toward right-wing Christian…
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…this time—after all of the atrocious and dangerous behavior—a significant number would turn away and vote for a return to conventional presidential leadership. Where are these defectors? As I write this, election boards around the country have already counted the votes of over 67 million people who want more death, more deception, and more openly racist and exclusionary public policies. And a huge number of these voters identify as Christian. And…
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…professor of medical anthropology at Oregon State University. The growing number of women seeking a secular midwife has created a gap in care, however. In some areas the preponderance of Christian midwifery, in tandem with restrictive laws, can make it difficult for secular women to locate a well-matched midwife. Anna Waterland-Dykstra, a nurse and director of community options at the Spearfish Family Planning clinic of the South Dakota Departmen…
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…(down eight percent in seven years, to 70.6 percent), and the rise in the number of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, and otherwise religiously unaffiliated (up six points in seven years, to 22.8 percent). Greg Smith, Associate Director of Research at the Pew Research Center, called the pace of the continued growth of the religiously unaffiliated “really remarkable.” The number of Americans identifying with no religion grew by 19 millio…
Read More…Catholicism, is in many ways the most traditional Catholic of the sizeable number of Catholics jostling for the GOP nod. Bobby Jindal has labeled himself a “Catholic Evangelical” and even hosted “The Response,” a prayer extravaganza that amounts to a full-out paean to Christian nationalism. Rick Santorum has long courted the Christian right with his anti-abortion rhetoric and was once named by Time magazine as one of the nation’s “25 Most Influent…
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…ay even about the five newspapers that I do cover in my book. But the vast number of people and papers that I wasn’t able to concentrate on in the book just underscores how much work there is left to do on the black press. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? Outside of a small group of specialists in early African-American print culture, most people that I’ve talked to about my subject are surprised to learn that black wo…
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…xploring their spirituality in different ways.’ I think eventually a large number of those people will re-affiliate in some way, shape, or form—but when they do, the actual institutions of religion will be very different because of the demands those people make on new kinds of churches. I look at that whole arc of people who are leaving church because of the failure of the institution, and I don’t see that as threatening. I see that as a really ex…
Read More…ondents believe interracial marriage should be illegal; 24% of evangelicals did. Sixty-six percent of respondents in Mississippi do not believe in evolution; among evangelicals that number jumped to 74%. Of all the respondents, 29% believe interracial marriage should be illegal; among evangelicals that number was 33%….
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…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 distribute artificial intelligence across multiple hardware…
Read More…the span of a decade. Per annum, it is 0.001%. If we take a more realistic number of 4 million American Muslims, the numbers become 0.005% over a decade, or 0.0005% per year. Last year there were 14,000 homicides in the U.S., and with a population of 300,000,000, that’s about 0.0005% of the population are murderers. The report ends with this sage advice: “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terr…
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