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Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

By Amina Wadud

…sque is gigantic, full of beautiful and elaborate designs, with an immense number of repetitions to them. The stairs and the escalators are deceiving, taking two for each floor in one tower and only one escalator per floor in another tower. I never did figure out which was which. I knew the fastest way up to the third floor from my hotel, but this was always early and therefore less chaotic. It also involved a wide ramp straight from the outer fro…

Are You Rapture Ready?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…Radio said their math for setting the return date came from a verse in Luke 17: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” According to Camping’s prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about the flood. He said the flood happened in 4990 B.C., on what would have been May 21 in the modern calendar. God gave Noah one week of warning. Since one day equals 1…

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

….’” —Robert Ingersoll, 1896 I connected instantly with Kate Blanchard’s May 10 piece, “Coming Out As a Heretic.” I too grew up in a Christian family, and, despite very intense Christian devotion and deep soul- and scripture-searching, I “fell away” from the faith in my early twenties. I have been “unchurched” for about six years now and have often struggled to identify my current relationship to the Christian faith. Simply identifying as an athei…

What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

By John Stoehr

…es Congress created such commissions after the Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Along with being good for democracy and patriotism, a commission of this kind is the right thing to do. If the Republicans do not explicitly see themselves as God’s chosen, they act like it implicitly—in that they have decided, as a political party over a number of years, that only Republicans can rule legitimately. Th…

Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…” according to Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll. The church has 12 million members worldwide, 7 million of those in the United States. More than 100 clergy came out on the eve of General Conference. On Wednesday, delegates voted 428-405 to create a commission that “will spend at least two years reviewing policy on the subject” and developing a plan to deal with sharp differences within the denomination on inclusion of LGBT people in th…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…was not the emperor to whom Paul appealed. Nero was! Tiberius reigned from 14–37 CE. Acts of the Apostles only refers to the emperor to whom Paul appealed after his arrest in Jerusalem by the generic title “Caesar,” but the other historical figures mentioned as part of Paul’s trials (especially Porcius Festus, who governed Judea beginning around 59 CE) leave no doubt that the emperor in question is none other than Nero (r. 54–68 CE). Later ancien…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…one of works, of human effort. Miracles would just muddy the holy water. In 1956, Elisabeth’s husband Jim, along with four other young men, were killed by the very Waorani people of Amazonian Ecuador to whom they had come to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ. The story of their modern day martyrdom was told in Ms. Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor, published the following year. Copious copies of the book have sold for the past half century and it…

By The Numbers: Jeb Opposes Francis on Climate Change at His Peril

By Daniel Schultz

…happening, or if it is, it’s natural causes, or they’re just not sure. The numbers attributing warming to human activity rise among moderates and liberals, of course, but they’re not going to vote for Jeb anyway. There is one number Bush might want to worry about, though: 85. That’s the percent of Hispanic Catholics who think climate change is a real problem: For a guy who’s been touting his potential to draw Spanish-speaking voters into the Repub…

Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

By Ann Gleig

…er it echoes some of the white Buddhist backlash to racial justice work. A number of white Buddhists* have adopted the language of “invasion” and “infection” in an attempt to discredit long overdue racial justice initiatives in their communities. Popular Zen teacher Brad Warner, for instance, has declared that racial justice work has nothing to do with Buddhism but is merely a tool of identity politics designed to shame white men. Secular mindfuln…

Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

By Spencer Dew

…map (as compiled by Salatomatic, an Islamic guide to mosques) compiled the number of mosques per state, while the second, using U.S. Department of State data, charts the number of refugees arriving in each state (from October 2014-July 2015), and the third offers “a compilation of Islamic terror activity by state” pairing the names of organizations with U.S. cities (for instance, Boca Raton, Florida, is flagged for “Al Qaeda”). The source for this…