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Religion in Real Time on CNN’s “Believer”: A Conversation with Reza Aslan

By Kaya Oakes

…adaptive and individualistic and growing so fast, much in the same way the number of “spiritual but not religious” people is growing. Yes, and the exact same thing is paralleled in Scientology. You have a church that is obsessed with maintaining an absolute iron grip over the religion. If you don’t follow Scientology under the church’s guidance, you’re not really a Scientologist. And that again has led to stagnation, it’s led to a massive drop in…

Note to the Tax-Slashers:
We Are Already Serfs

By Peter Laarman

…the New York Times a few weeks back, since 1970 we have cut the effective rate of taxation for our very wealthiest in half: from 35 percent on average to 16.62 percent. Overall tax revenues in the United States haven’t reached 30 percent of GDP since 1965. We spend less on cash transfers to needy people—unemployment insurance, public pensions, benefits for children, etc.—than any other OECD country except for Korea, but we lead the world in lavis…

Mao, Meet Confucius: China’s Religious Revolution

By Kwok Pui-lan

…ominations in the U.S. continues to decline, many Westerners marvel at the rate of growth of Chinese Christianity. In 1949 there were about 700,000 Chinese Protestants; today the number is estimated to be 50-80 million, if one includes members of house churches. Adding 8-12 million Catholics, China will soon become home to the largest Christian population on the globe. How did this Religious Renaissance Come About? Many new Buddhist temples have…

“It’s Up to Us to Save Ourselves”: What Wisconsin is Teaching Us

By Jill Jacobs

…wages and working conditions. The group had tried, unsuccessfully, to penetrate the Triangle factory. Who knows whether the disaster might have been averted if the workers there had been able to bargain collectively for safer conditions. Following the disaster, it was the ILGWU that led the charge to implement stronger safety legislation. Now, 100 years later, public workers in Wisconsin and around the country are standing up to the largest-scale…

New Poll Shows Strong Catholic Support for Gay Rights

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…nation and 60 percent favoring adoption by gay and lesbian couples. “These numbers surprise many Americans given their presumptions about Catholics,” said Dr. Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at Catholic University. Schneck also pointed out what he called another “striking feature” of the report—a feature that marriage equality supporters may find sobering in an otherwise upbeat report. Schneck po…

The Cult of Kurzweil: Will Robots Save Our Souls?

By Robert M. Geraci

…class in 2009 (40 students were accepted). Public policy leaders and corporate officers have attended executive classes and funding has come from major tech companies such as Google and Nokia. Press surrounding the university has been positive, including even an encouraging review from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which suggests that traditional universities have much to learn from SU’s curriculum. What we see is the emergence of a genuine…

BYU Honor Code Used to Harass Black Atheletes

By Joanna Brooks

…omeone is usually black. We live in a country that criminalizes and incarcerates young black men at incredibly disproportionate rates—in 2009, African-Americans comprised 12.4% of the general US population and 38.2% of its prison population—and in some regions spends more money on prisons than it does on public universities. How moral is that? I truly wish I could say my religion, my alma mater, were different, somehow better than the rest of Amer…

Goldstone 2.0: God Plays No Favorites

By Jill Jacobs

…y did everything necessary to avoid civilian casualties. The high casualty rate, as well as many soldiers’ testimonies, suggests otherwise. We can commend Israel for responding to the initial report by conducting an internal investigation of its wartime activities, and criticize Hamas for failing to investigate its own activities. And, at the same time, we can question Israel’s refusal to allow a third-party investigation. Far from being a traitor…

Pseudo-Historian David Barton in the Times and on The Daily Show

By Julie Ingersoll

…anges in society as described by the Times: lower SAT scores, higher crime rates, teen pregnancy rate and so on. Barton attempts to quantify the “volume” of prayers by calculating the number of school children and the amount of time they were spending in daily prayers. He then overlaid that with graphs showing cultural decline in order to ostensibly demonstrate the effect of the Supreme Court rulings that removed school-sponsored prayer from the c…

American Indians Irate over Bin Laden Code Name “Geronimo”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…S Armed Forces. American Indians serve in the US military at six times the rate of any other minority. The first woman to die in combat in the Iraq war was Lori Piestewa, a Hopi Indian woman. And yet throughout the United States, Native women are remembered only by the place names that use the deeply offensive “s” word which is historically connected to the rape and sexual exploitation of Indian women. During the Vietnam War the US military referr…