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

By Katherine Kelaidis

…hurch in America (OCA). Both are, unsurprisingly, characterized by a large number of American converts in their ranks. Nearly 70% of those in the AOA are converts, while the OCA is about evenly split, 50-50. Similarly, the GOA, arguably the most progressive Orthodox body in America—“progressive” being a relative term—remains almost exclusively composed of ethnic Greeks. Focused on their own ethnic political concerns, including the position of the…

Park51 and the Ground Liberals Are Forced to
Fight On

By Sarah Posner

…ied too much on kumbaya cliches, and a Democratic fear of alienating sought-after center-right Catholics and evangelicals, to name several biggies. But I think in this case, the sacred is our protection of religious freedom and diversity, not ground zero or 9/11, which have already been subject to much sacrilege. And that’s exactly why Democrats “getting religion” has to mean getting all religion, and not just the right’s monopolistic definition o…

Can Mormon Glenn Beck Unite the Christian Right?

By Kathryn Joyce

…e tax laws encourage large families, and the government encourages a family-and-faith-centered legal system, which repeals “witch-hunting” child abuse laws that restrict parental discipline as well as no-fault divorce; imposes penalties for unmarried cohabitation; and reconfigures Social Security to provide support on a family, rather than individual basis, so that women are recognized not for their work as independent employees but for their role…

The End (of Religion) is Near, Scientists Say

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…make no parallel effort to learn ours. And that is precisely what this not-so-benign linguistic analogy suggests. If “religion” (never defined) is like Quechua—and thus rapidly dying out, I take it—then who’s speaking the religious equivalent of imperial Spanish? It would seem to be the scientists themselves, and their language of choice is math. That makes this study no longer benign or funny. It’s an almost sneering and worrisome glimpse into t…

LGBT Editor In Bangladesh Murdered by Islamists—and More, In this Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…people. “There’s a scar left by a screwdriver next to my liver,” the craggy-bearded and long-haired transgender man says, describing how his college classmates attacked him in 1997 in Tashkent, the capital of this former Soviet republic, a mostly Muslim nation of 31 million. Yan was helped by living in the relatively cosmopolitan city of Tashkent, which he says is a world apart from the countryside when transgender people can be raped and killed w…

Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…rew up hearing exactly that kind of talk. Betsy DeVos happens to be the now-very-public face of what has long been a quiet but very powerful drive for taxpayer-supported religious schooling that has been carried on by one of America’s least-understood ethnic tribes, the Dutch Calvinists of the Upper Midwest. By my count, nine of the thirteen board members of Christian Schools International, a kind of clearing house for the movement, have Dutch nam…

National Review’s Kevin Williamson Comes Out Against Daughters, Misunderstands Science

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…rceived by many as espousing virulent, mean-spirited sexism; There is a non-trivial number of men who actually love their daughters and are neither disappointed they exist nor convinced that it means they’re low-status males; There is a non-trivial number of human beings who are unrepentant daughters and/or fallopian tube havers and/or cardigan wearers; There was a Republican president in recent memory who had two daughters; There are social conse…

How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

By Cody J. Sanders

…gely worse)―and remains a cornerstone of the funeral industry a century-and-a-half later. When the first modern cremation was conducted in the U.S. in 1876, burning the remains of a loved one was an unintelligible funerary practice. No one at the time could have predicted that the practice of cremation would become the chosen method of body disposition for 54.8% of the U.S. population today. Jessica Mitford’s famed economic critique of the funeral…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…inding meaning in the small things of life. My focus has always been on day-to-day spirituality, if you will. Finding value in the mundane. Over time, though, I began to see that what my family and I had experienced over a twelve-month period, though extraordinary, was part of our day-to-day life and had deep meaning; not only for us personally, but universally as well. The more I shared my experiences with the people around me, the more and more…

None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)

By Elizabeth Drescher

…number of those who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated. Take the 36-year-old nonprofit director from Chicago who describes herself as “something like an atheist… most days.” She insists that being an unbeliever has no bearing on her almost daily prayer practice: Do I need to believe in God to say that I pray? No. I just pray. I focus my intention on the gratitude I have for a meal, or a friend, or a member of my family. Maybe it’s instinct…