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Are Conservative Churches Really Winning by Being More Orthodox?

By Daniel Schultz

…t Catholics tend to be more fertile than mainline Protestants, the topline numbers mask a complex underlying situation. According to the Pew Forum’s Religious Landscape Survey, since 1972, Catholics have been about 25% of the total population in the United States. However, white Catholics have been in serious decline during the same period. It’s only lopsided margins of Catholics among immigrant groups (especially Hispanics) that has propped the C…

French “Burqa Ban”: It’s Not About Religion

By Amina Wadud

…ongratulating me! I thought: if my dress made no difference to you before, really, then why should my undress make such a difference to you now? I never got an answer to that question, but my development on the matter moved on. After one year hijab-less, I decided that I really, personally, prefer to wear hijab. I told the story before about my slave ancestors denied the option to cover certain parts of their bodies on the auction block. So I resu…

Ian Buruma on the Political Excesses of Religion

By Lisa Webster

…an issue in the local town people do go to town hall meetings. I’ve never really seen that in Europe. And people vote for everybody: police commissioner, town controller. There isn’t anything really quite like that in Europe. You talk about the difference between the French idea of laïcité and secularism. Can you explain that? Secularism can mean two things. It can be a description of a society where church is clearly separated from state—in that…

How Conservative Christian Women Came to Claim “True” Feminism

By Eric C. Miller

…ve mentioned earlier, using your opponent’s symbols for your own gain is a really normal tactic that all groups perform, liberal advocacy groups included. So if we’re looking for a source of distinction that sets CWA or the Christian Right apart from other social movements, we won’t find it here. You offer many examples of CWA speakers and writers being tricky or manipulative in their arguments, but ultimately you conclude that they aren’t really…

God and the Gay Christian: An Interview with Matthew Vines

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…one-flesh is about how anatomy fits together. He argued that one-flesh is really about the relational kinship bond created between two people in marriage and how anatomy fits together is not on the radar at all. There’s no reason then for a one-flesh marriage to involve different anatomy at all. So, there really are nothing essential to marriage in the Bible that could not include same-sex couples because marriage is fundamentally about keeping c…

What We Need to Understand is that Fascism is Intersectional and Erotic—’Thy Rod is Thy Gun,’ With a Hip-Thrust

By Annika Brockschmidt

…ork Times. And we had a lot of debates about whether I could include that. Really? We eventually decided I could include that—because it was a reference to equestrian sports. [He laughs] Really. If we were very insistent that there was no sexual innuendo whatsoever… Certainly not! Just a saddle used and put away! It’s about the mainstream media and the things that it’s afraid to talk about. So why have so many mainstream media outlets been hesitan…

Sex and the Ummah

By Amina Wadud

…tly class, not for those seeking spiritual enlightenment. On the contrary, really, really good sexual release (as in orgasm, in case that is too obscure) is supposed to clear one from preoccupation with such, and thereby make it easier to attain spiritual clarity. Marriage is not a sacrament, it is a contract. The thing that is being negotiated actually is access to one’s partner sexually. And since it is not a sacrament, it also has this positive…

Water Water Everywhere

By Amina Wadud

…’ stations. When it’s hot and dry, like in a desert, this ablution must be really, really refreshing. I imagine to linger over the more elaborate sunnah form is a luxury and a delight. But when I lived in Libya, the water used to cut off every day. (Well, the electricity cut off too and without it the water pump didn’t work, so there was no water pumped to the tanks above the apartment buildings.) We would get up for fajr prayer and there was only…

Close Encounters

By Amina Wadud

…r mature bodies, at the crossroads between here and there. God’s presence, really, really is everywhere, and at every occasion. But some times we are more open to that presence, and then we are transformed. People respond in different ways, to different circumstances. I’m particularly called to remembrance by things of beauty: patterns, especially in Nature; and by the acts of nature: sunsets and sunrises, standing mountains, oceans, rivers and tr…

Inside Outsourced: Come See Where Your Jobs Went

By Haroon Moghul

…ity, this film would be an opportunity to show commitment to that goal. We really need to start thinking outside the box as a community and start being receptive to people who do—regardless of their age, race, or gender. Another step the Muslim community really needs to take is to understand film financing. It’s great that Muslims are writing scripts, but without funding the public will never see the film. It would be great to see the producers i…