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Gambian Prez Rails Against Gay ‘Evil Empire’; Irish Priest Comes Out During Mass; Trans Talk on Tunisian TV Sparks Debate; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s identifying themselves as Catholics fell to 81 percent from 88 percent in 1997 and one in every 11 Catholics has considered leaving the church. Weekly church attendance among adults dropped to 37 percent in 2013 from 53 percent in 2006. There are signs that church attendance has ticked up in anticipation of the visit. “The line to a blockbuster movie? Hot selling concert? Celebrity autograph signing? Nope! It’s a Sunday Mass!,” said MJ Francisco…

New Report: Muslim Terrorism a ‘Minuscule Threat’

By Hussein Rashid

…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…

Speaking for Hinduism in the Absence of a Conversation

By Murali Balaji

…pseudoscience), her misinterpretation of key texts, and an unusually high number of factual inaccuracies (by some independent estimates, up to 500 errors). Doniger had every right to publish her book, and like every academic work, it will have its supporters and detractors. However, by dismissing her intellectual critics outright and not fully explaining the inaccuracies of her book, Doniger did a fundamental disservice to the nature of academic…

Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

By Patricia Miller

…fficking. As I note in Salon: According to Pew, between 2009 and 2014, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration — and by inference the Democratic Party — was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent. This suggests that the war on religion is resonating with Catholic voters who increasingly see themselves on the losing side of a culture war and feel the need to assert their religious identity i…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…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…

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…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…

More than Half of Mississippi GOP Primary Voters Believe the President is Muslim

By Sarah Posner

…with 33% to Romney’s 28%, and Santorum’s 29%. Of all the respondents, only 12% believe President Obama is a Christian, and 52% believe he is a Muslim. These numbers, like in Alabama, are more pronounced among evangelicals: only 9% of evangelicals in Mississippi believe the president is a Christian, and 54% believe he is a Muslim. The real question here is why evangelicals believe this false and debunked conspiracy theory that the Christian presid…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…overthrew democratically elected leaders for fear of what they might do. In 1979, Russia ‘intervened’ to save Afghanistan’s fractious Communist government, which gesture led to the deaths of nearly ten percent of Afghanistan’s population. Afghanistan has still not recovered. Subsequently to this horrifying military intervention, Russia cracked down on a Chechen independence movement that emerged, plausibly enough, with the collapse of the brutal S…

The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

By Andrew Aghapour

…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…

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

By Katherine Don

…g to do with killing a baby.” “Choice” and “Informed Consent” During the 1970s, an era perceived as the heyday of “crunchy” home birth advocacy, the divide between pro-life and pro-choice midwives was less conspicuous and presented fewer pragmatic problems since midwives tended to work in confined communities. “At that time, you had very religious conservative Christians practicing home births, and then you also had this hippie movement, these…