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Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…ars, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Washington, D.C., and doubled the number of students currently benefiting from private school choice to 400,000. All told, together, we’ve helped more than a million kids in private school choice programs, and we’re just getting started. “Just getting started”: we should not underestimate how seriously this should be taken….

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…really knows how to drive, it seems, and the water buffalo and cows are outnumbered in the streets only by the small and fast-moving motorized rickshaws. So when I was taking a four-hour taxi ride from Delhi to Agra I had to have something to distract my attention from the harrowing video game-like scene out the front window. A friend who was riding with me handed me a book called What Makes You Not a Buddhist. Written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse…

The Family Research Council’s Mistaken Identity

By Sarah Posner

…adical far right, described in the FBI’s Project Megiddo report as “a vast number and variety of groups, such as survivalists, militias, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, Christian Identity churches, the AN and skinheads.” The report called Christian Identity “the most unifying theology for a number of these diverse groups and one widely adhered to by white supremacists. It is a belief system that provides its members with a religious basis for racism…

London’s ‘Big Gay Iftar’ And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…the cultural rights of women. The deadline for submissions is May 19. The United Methodist Church’s judicial council ruled that a lesbian bishop’s election violated church law which holds that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” Foreign Affairs published “The Global Backlash Against Gay Rights: How Homophobia Became a Political Tool” by Omar G. Encarnación. The article examines the pushback against gay rights…

The GOP’s Race to the
Dark Ages

By Sarah Posner

…e Affordable Care Act that their health insurance provide employees co-pay-free birth control, even though churches themselves are already exempt. A Catholic and an evangelical university have sued HHS over the rule, citing “religious liberty.” Republicans have been making their intentions on access to birth control clear since they began campaigning to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood. They say it’s about federal funding going to abortion…

8 Bill Maher Statements For UC Berkeley To Consider Before Commencement

By Nathan Lean

…her has expressed alarm that Muhammad is the most popular baby name in the United Kingdom because he doesn’t want “the Western world to be taken over by Islam.” UC Berkeley’s insistence that Maher will be its mid-year commencement keynote speaker is worrisome given comments like these. He’s free to believe and say whatever he wants, but it violates nobody’s rights to ensure that the voices of those who harbor such obvious prejudice are not elevate…

What the USCCB’s New “Religious Liberty” Initiative Took from Evangelicals

By Sarah Posner

…endorsement of a particular religion or religious view, and to elevate the Free Exercise Clause, which guarantees freedom of religion, above it: Over the past several years, ADF has seized on “viewpoint discrimination” to put the gay rights movement in its cross hairs. Gay rights, in ADF’s view, cannot coexist with its version of Christianity. Anti-harassment codes at schools and universities, gay rights events, and other expressions of freedom or…

Bishops Have No Religious Freedom Claim

By Sarah Posner

…— free exercise of religion, that in order for a law to violate somebody’s free exercise, it has to impinge — substantially burden — their religious practice. And there is no substantial burden on Catholics’ religious practice by providing coverage — insurance coverage for contraception for other people. No one is making Catholics who do not want contraception to take it. No one is making the bishops take it, and so it’s not really a First Amendme…

The Shared Assumption Behind Creationism and Anti-GMO in Europe

By Michael Schulson

…n whatever elements they can use within their own cultural context. In the United States, it’s very important to creationists that one can give at least the impression of [creationism] being a science. So you have the development of scientific creationism, intelligent design, under the pressure of the First Amendment. But you don’t have something like that in England. English creationists are much less worried about making sure that their beliefs…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…ise in hate crimes and speech against Jews both internationally and in the United States, Weisman provides a powerful voice about what it means and feels like to have such hate directed towards you. Reflecting on a conversation with someone who had denied that antisemitism still exists in the United States, Weisman responds “I recoiled at her words and argued passionately that Jews must never think that anti-Semitism has been eradicated. Vigilance…