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Forced Cremation of Covid Dead in Sri Lanka Further Marginalizes Muslim Community

By Andrea Malji and Amarnath Amarasingam

…lar anti-Muslim sentiment and disinformation in India as well. In previous pandemics, particularly Ebola, preparations of the dead were seen as a leading cause of viral spread. While care should certainly be taken with the handling of bodies that have passed from Covid, the risk of viral spread is limited, and cremation is not necessary. The continued practice of forced cremation represents a violation of human rights and religious freedom. As the…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…hing you had to leave out? Early on I decided to focus intently on a small number of newspapers, rather than try to tackle the whole range of black newspapers published before the Civil War. I’m still happy with this decision to go for depth over breadth, but it means that there are lots of papers that I didn’t have a chance to include. I would have really liked to spend some time with Frederick Douglass’ Paper, or the Christian Recorder, but happ…

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…

Satanic or Silly: Does Yale Press Censorship of Cartoons Insult Muslims?

By Daniel Martin Varisco

…d States military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan, drone bombings in Pakistan and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, there are far more relevant pretexts available than an Ivy League book that may not even warrant review in major newspapers. The peddlers of Islamophobia in the media, popular trade books, and blogs would have us believe that radical extremists are lurking everywhere just waiting for an excuse to promote violence. To suggest tha…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…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…

Hell, in Rob Bell’s Own Words: State of Belief Radio

By The Editors

…entions while it went around the world basically crushing everybody in its path. And these first Christians took that military propaganda of a good news, of another city that Caesar had vanquished, and they used it to talk about Jesus, who they believed was the true Lord, who said there’s a better way to be in the world and that’s the way of sacrificial love and humble service. So if that’s what we mean by Good News, I’m all about it. [WG]: I unde…

Special Report: Have Evangelical Colleges Succumbed to “Theological Paranoia”?

By Chrissy Stroop

…t on the record, but the pain caused by these colleges and universities is palpable. As Richard Flory recently observed here on RD, “many lives have been ruined in the name of theological purity.” I, too, am pessimistic about the future of American evangelicalism, but I join him in his reminder that that future has not yet been written. As the administrations at evangelical schools are acting on both ideological imperatives and financial incentive…

Participant Discredits the Original Ex-Gay Study

By Warren Throckmorton

…e American Journal of Psychiatry.* In that study, they claimed that 11 men participating in a crisis hotline at the Melodyland Christian Center, pastored by Ralph Wilkinson in Anaheim, CA, had changed dramatically from gay to straight. But in an interview, Michael Bussee, who had been a leader at Melodyland at the time of the study, told me, “We professed that we had been healed—past tense—because it was part of the theology to claim your healing…

Breivik’s Religious Pluralist Vision: A COEXIST Bumper Sticker Without the Crescent

By Michael J. Altman

…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…

Unprecedented Anti-LGBTQ Statement By Orthodox Church in America Should Be Christian Nationalist Warning Sign to US Orthodoxy

By Katherine Kelaidis

…Yet despite his relatively brief tenure the damage had been done. Over the past decade, the OCA has continued to follow the path that Metropolitan Jonah laid for it. It should not go unnoticed that Metropolitan Tikhon, the current head of the OCA, is also a convert from the Episcopal Church, and one who seems equally fixated on culture war issues—particular, abortion and same-sex marriage—as his predecessor. Predictably, the consequences of his le…