Religion Dispatches
…llion atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for more than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being…
Read More…and I’ll do an event, and the level of electricity, of excitement, and the number of people who say: “I always had these questions, I always wondered about this, I always knew there was another way to understanding this…” It’s really… It blows me away. Every night, at one of these events, I just… Wow. What an amazing thing to be a part of. [WG]: Tell us, what has been your favorite comment from a reader, or, one or two of your favorite comments. […
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…and tolerance for a range of political views. Given a worrisome trend at a number of Christian schools, not all would make that same choice today. Larycia Hawkins, associate professor of political science at Wheaton College and the only tenured woman of color in the school’s 156-year history, is just the latest case to hit the headlines. After initially suspending Hawkins for asserting in a Facebook post that Christians and Muslims worship the sam…
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…, E.M., & Pattison, M.L. (1980). “‘Ex-gays’: Religiously Mediated Change in Homosexuals.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 137, 1553-1562….
Read More…urdered more than 300 million individuals,” going so far as to divide that number up: “3/4 Hindu/Buddhist, Animist/Pagan 1/4 Christian/Jewish/Zoroastrian.” So, while it’s true that he borrows a lot of imagery and language from the Christian crusades, such a list of world religions indicates that Breivik also thought in terms of modern religious diversity. It wasn’t merely Christendom versus Islam, it was a world of peaceful religions defending the…
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…ion composed of immigrants and their descendants. However, beginning in the 1980s, there were an increasing number of converts to Orthodoxy, many of whom (though notably and importantly not all) came as refugees from debates of gender and sexuality in their own denominations—debates they had lost. These conversions have been a major catalyst in the transformation of the political face of American Orthodox Christianity and bring at least some of th…
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…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…
Read More…inciples so it’s kind of important when you see a poll that says a growing number of Americans think you might be a Muslim. The President continues to tell everyone he’s a Christian but yet the number rises. See that? Which came first, the thought he was a Muslim or the lack of trust? If he is a Muslim, he can’t be trusted? Or if you can’t trust him, he must be a Muslim? In any case, Obama strained mightily to placate the likes of Graham and Brody…
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…lobal conservative movement in response to international conferences in the 1990s, particularly concerning reproductive or women’s rights, which they feared could affect US law back home. At the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, Pope John Paul II (an early bridge-builder who’d allied himself with Billy Graham and Campus Crusade for Christ in the 1970s) called for interfaith opposition to the conference’s draft program of action…
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…ctivity bubble to the surface. Lost in the debate is the large and growing number of thoughtful people who self-identify as “spiritual, but not religious” (that is, as non-affiliated), an admittedly complex phrase than doesn’t allow for easy analysis either. But, as has been frequently noted on RD, religion is highly dispersed in the modern period; it’s not going away, it’s just going elsewhere. Sometimes the “spiritual, but not religious” person…
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