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Is It the Job of Religion Journalists to Define “Religion”?

By Ann Taves

…t establishes a comprehensive way of life that is held out as the right or best way of life for those who adhere to it.” The key term is “comprehensive.” CrossFit, football, Star Trek, and dieting fads are insufficiently comprehensive to count as religion. Linker, recognizing that his definition would encompass philosophy, distinguishes between them based on the source of their knowledge regarding the best way of life: “religion,” he claims, “is t…

Conservatives, Messianic Jews, and the Jews

By Sarah Posner

…ited for Israel and other Christian Zionist groups “the Jews’ and Israel’s best friends in the world,” also tried to blame liberals, not Messianic Jews, for challenges to Judaism. “For 40 years I have argued that Jews for Jesus pose little or no danger to Jewish survival,” Prager wrote. “We Jews should be preoccupied with all the Jews for Nothing, the Jews for anti-Zionism, the Jews for radical Leftism.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again h…

Vigil Planned in Wake of Suicide by 17-Year-Old
Gay Mormon

By Joanna Brooks

…After his death, students at his Ogden-area high school wore their Sunday best to school to remember him. A local United Church of Christ is donating the candles for the vigil. Organizer Marian Edmonds, pastor of City of Hope Church in Salt Lake City and organizer of the OUTReach resource center in Ogden, will staff a table at the event to recruit mentors to help work with LGBT young people to prevent suicide. And Mormons are volunteering to spe…

To Fight White Supremacy We Must Resist Essentialism: The Author Responds

By Andrea R. Jain

…now is this: how can we wage this battle even more effectively? How can we best shield ourselves from the inevitable onslaughts of predatory journalists, readers, and politicians who prefer “fake news” over evidence-based, critical discussions on religion and society? How can we more fully reap the rewards of living dangerously? It is not about policing our tone or maintaining respectability. On the contrary, I beg public intellectuals: do not san…

Church Attendance is (Once Again) Correlated with Authoritarianism — So Why Do We Refuse to Acknowledge It?

By Chrissy Stroop

…nald Trump’s politics, and his appeal to White evangelical Christians, are best explained through the lens of authoritarianism. Pundits initially scratched their heads for entirely too long over how evangelicals could purport to follow Jesus and support Trump. The answer was always easy; he promised to do, and then did, what they wanted, which any disaffiliated former Christian school kid or survivor of evangelical homeschooling could have told an…

On Death and After-Death

By Amina Wadud

…, you’d know there really is something to this transition. Apparently, the best response is one of surrender. Well, then again, I guess some people would rather go kicking and screaming, trying to resist. Anyway, as I said, my point is about gender and death in the Qur’an. Death is an equal-opportunity supervisor, so every soul will taste it. No special taste on the basis of gender. Thank you very much. We know from the Qur’an that there are two a…

Megachurch Pastor: We’re “American Al Qaeda” for Opposing Homosexuality

By Tom Bartlett

…time in our conversation, Chandler lowered his booming voice. The gays are best discussed in hushed tones. Like Chandler, Giglio said homosexuality was not a focus of his ministry. But notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say that his views had evolved since the 1990s. He didn’t say that he no longer thought gays and lesbians were hell-bound. He didn’t say that the dreaded homosexual agenda had ceased to be a threat to these great United States. H…

Evangelical Stephen Baldwin’s Imitatio Christi & “Reality” TV

By Gabriel Mckee

…isms—they dumb us down, they elevate public humiliation—but what I’m really interested in is the way shows like Spike’s Joe Schmo Show or VH1’s I Love Money turn into morality plays about the value of friendship and loyalty. In the best reality shows, the initial rush of schadenfreude is gradually replaced with a genuine affection for the “good guys,” and righteous frustration at the machinations of the villains. I’m also fascinated by the villain…

Interview with Karen Armstrong

By Andrea Bistrich

…oday, she is among the most renowned theologians, and has written numerous best-sellers on the great religions and their founders. She is one of eighteen leading group members of the Alliance of Civilizations, an initiative of former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, whose purpose is to fight extremism and further dialogue between the Western and Islamic worlds. She talks here to German journalist Andrea Bistrich about politics, religion, extremism…

Satanic FOIA Reveals Deep Confusion About 1st Amendment

By Joseph Laycock

The Satanic Temple, best known for its offer to build a monument to Satan in an attempt to challenge the Constitutionality of a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma, recently filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain any correspondence surrounding the issue. Lucien Greaves, the Temple’s organizer, sent me over a hundred letters, petitions, and audio files of voice mail messages addressed to the Oklahoma Capital Preservation Com…