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Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection

By Jacob J. Erickson

…Elephants: An African Love Story. Once a day, strictly between the hours of 11AM and 12PM, the orphanage opens to the public for a visitor’s fee of 500 Kenyan shillings (a little under six U.S dollars at the moment). That strict time is a kind of compromise—a minimal amount of human contact for the orphans so the orphanage can raise some necessary funds for their care. The human animals arrive, line up, pay their dues, at eleven the crowd is let i…

Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…SBC claimed 15,735,640 members, and in 2014, that number fell by 236,467 to 15,499,173—that’s a 1.5 percent decline. However, on this stat alone, the claim could be made that churches are simply clearing out the cobwebs and tidying up their membership rolls so their numbers more accurately reflect their active members. The problem is, membership isn’t alone in its decline—it’s joined by baptisms and weekly worship attendance. Whoops. If anything,…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…that happened over a twelve month period in my family’s life (as well as a number of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a…

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…

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…

“I Speak to God in Public”: Are Young Black Millennials Reclaiming a Theology of Resistance?

By Joshua L. Lazard

…ch of the research around trends—specifically with millennials born between 1981 and 1996—reveals a much more complex American landscape. The larger takeaway in the 2014 study was that the American church was losing members—and that became the sexy cover story. Lost in the weeds was the fact that affiliation with historically black denominations was more or less even (the loss was less than one full percentage point). And generally speaking, black…

Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

By Chris Stedman

…criticism can easily devolve into unthinking prejudice. I can think of any number of examples from atheist conferences I’ve attended, such as the time I watched with dismay as attendees shouted “show us some ankle” at women wearing burkas for a satirical musical performance, or when a group of fundamentalist Muslim protesters was encircled by a crowd of hundreds of atheist conference attendees shouting things like “go back to the Middle East, you…

South Asian Religious Leaders Challenged to Take on Stigma and Discrimination: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…rs given by the Constitution of the Republic through Regulation 824 of Law Number 1951Article 4306 – the purpose of which is to prevent public performances that offend the morals, good customs and relationship between friendly countries – imposes this ban based on Miley Cyrus’ common engagement in acts during her concerts that defy morals and customs in ways usually penalized by Dominican law,” a statement reads. They add that Cyrus “uses inadequa…