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‘Calling’ Rick Warren to Task on Anti-Gay Ugandan Law

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…n to be in front of the story or get run over by it,” she told Religion Dispatches. Her conversation came after Warren had already declined to make a public statement against the pending law, telling Newsweek: The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the politica…

From The Virgin Mary to a Housewife in Queens: Inside The Seer of Bayside

By Joseph Laycock

…st never true. If you simply open Veronica Lueken’s prophecies to a random page and read about Freemasons and UFOs, it’s easy to assume that all Baysiders are paranoid and hysterical. But when I did my ethnography I found that most Baysiders were pleasant, reasonable people. I also found that Baysiders exerted a lot of agency in terms of what they believed and how they practiced. Some seemed more interested in conspiracy theories about the Vatican…

“God Created You”: Bishop Supports Gay Ugandans, Defies Death Threats

By Jocelyn Edwards

…by Kato. “According to the suspect, he negotiated with the deceased to be paid money as he was to be used as a sexual partner,” said Kayihura. But the LGBT community in Uganda has said that they fear a cover-up by a government trying to downplay the homophobia in the East African nation. The proposal of last year’s anti-gay bill in the country’s parliament provoked a firestorm of criticism in the international community, with donors—who account f…

Giving Up God—Not Just a Spiritual Stunt

By Becky Garrison

…st in today’s spiritual marketplace? Linn Marie Tonstad suggests that I am participating in a postmodern marketplace of religious ideas, choosing my “beliefs” from a smorgasbord of options. But then in the last sentence she seems to suggest that there might be a “marketplace” motive to my actions—that I might stand to benefit in the marketplace from my yearlong experience of atheism. First of all, I’m not sure what the marketplace of religious bel…

Satanic FOIA Reveals Deep Confusion About 1st Amendment

By Joseph Laycock

…n founded the United States as an explicitly Christian nation. There was a palpable cognitive dissonance as constituents tried to formulate legal arguments that reconciled their ideas of America as both a Christian nation based on Mosaic law and a nation that guarantees religious freedom, which resulted in such statements as: Yes, people have a choice as to what they want to believe and yet we need to make that “choosing” as easy as possible to ch…

Christian Atheism: The Only Response Worth its Salt to the Zimmerman Verdict

By J. Kameron Carter

…p the ante. If Dr. Butler is right that the Zimmerman acquittal displays a particular kind of god, the “American god,” then the only response to the problem of (this) god is atheism. I’m not talking about the atheism of the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or the late Christopher Hitchens. The atheism I’m talking about entails social, political, and intellectual struggle, not against some god-in-the-abstract, but rather against a specific…

“What Kind of Islam Is That?”: Talking With Refugees From ISIS

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…Yazidi camp where some 3500 were living in tents in what had been a municipal park. I had to get special permission as a writer from government authorities to enter any refugee camp in Kurdistan or Turkey—though in this case I also had to gain the approval of local leaders who ran the camp. One of them joined in the conversations and urged the Yazidi refugees to tell me what had happened to them. Their stories were particularly harrowing. A middl…

Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus: 1946-2011

By Lauri Lebo

…alistic take on life, I can’t say it didn’t work at least somewhat in my case. But I’m still a sucker for the cross of gaud. Given that Mrs Roach has long ago departed with the angel band, I can confess to having stood around in any number of European cathedrals gawking at some particularly ostentatious representation of the ‘nailin’ boards’. In addition to his two books, Bageant has written numerous poignant essays, which can be read here. Oh, Jo…

Qaddafi Dies; Should it Matter How?

By Haroon Moghul

…power and his arrogant prestige had deserted him, and he was in the end a pathetic, hideous thing, hated and humiliated. We do not always see justice in this world. But seeing what happened to Qaddafi, it is hard to deny there is not here an epic, divine, overwhelming arc of evil rising and consuming itself. He brought this on himself. But that thought doesn’t push me to celebration. In this death brought by a man upon himself, I think rather of…

Why I Won’t Leave the Mormon Church Alone

By Holly Welker

…I studied its texts, learned its doctrines. I went through the temple and participated in the rituals there. I served a mission, learning Mandarin Chinese so that I could teach the Mormon gospel in Taiwan. Given the depth of my attachment to Mormonism, the decision to leave was correspondingly agonizing. As I know from discussing the topic with former Mormons from England, Belgium, Germany, and South Africa, the rupture can be harrowing even for…