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Data-Mining Denominations: Same-Sex Marriage Edition

By Daniel Schultz

…people are by intensity, measured with the simple hack of subtracting the number of people Strongly Opposed to same-sex marriage from the number Strongly In Favor. Not surprisingly, since the Unitarian-Universalists only had 6 percent opposed, their position on the chart hardly budged at all. Other groups traveled a little more. Mainline Baptists, for example, strongly disapprove just a little more than they strongly approve. Evangelical Baptists…

Jonestown at 40: The Real Conspiracy Is More Disturbing Than the Theories

By Rebecca Moore

…been acquired, and dress rehearsals occurred, all with the complicity of a number of individuals. Unfortunately that cohort included my older sister Carolyn Layton and my younger sister Annie Moore (both of whom died in Jonestown). But quite a few others were part of the conspiracy as well, including the team of young men from Jonestown who ambushed Congressman Ryan and his party as they attempted to leave. Knowing the identities of the conspirato…

ABC’s Hit Sitcom Black-ish Does God, Pushes Theological Respectability

By Anthony B. Pinn

…ed simply “God,” encourages us to laugh with stereotypical depictions of African Americans as opposed to having us laugh at them—that is, to accept the stereotype as an inside joke. The episode centers on Zoey (Yara Shahidi), the eldest of the Johnson kids, who refuses to pray at the start of family dinner because she has growing doubt concerning the reality of God. For her, the suffering that overwhelms human experience challenges belief. Can the…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed minors and some covered it up. What’s so mysterious about that? A large number of minors have been sexually abused by a large number of clerics. Period. Full stop. It’s simply the beginning of a hideous story that includes the abuse of seminarians, nuns and other women, children of priests, and more, all of whom merit summits of their own. Francis’ discussion of power fell flat. He claimed that the sexual abuse of minors is an abuse of power. H…

Marriage equality and ‘the end of Catholic Ireland’; Gambian Prez vows to slit gays’ throats; Colombian govt affirms support for marriage and adoption; global LGBT recap

By Peter Montgomery

…t told Uganda’s Kuchu Times, a news outlet run by LGBT activists in east Africa…. Indeed, Kuchu Times reflected on the hostile environment LGBT Africans face in the media, lamenting that “Such incidences where the media has incited violence to the point of death should serve as a lesson not to put other people’s lives in danger, but not in Africa.” Critics included many of the paper’s own readers: Comments on the newspaper’s website were overwhelm…

The Plot to Turn the Synod into a “Plot”

By Patricia Miller

…nod is to take up. The Supreme Pontiff may, if he so chooses, increase the number of members of the Synod of Bishops by adding bishops, or religious to represent the religious institutes, or clerics who are experts, to the extent of fifteen percent of the total number of the members mentioned in articles V and VIII. Despite this, Douthat assures us that “as a Catholic,” he expects “the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith…

The Family Research Council’s Mistaken Identity

By Sarah Posner

…n a shooting spree in three different cities where he killed a number of African Americans and Jews and Asians that day. Those groups are groups that claim to be extremely anti-government and Christian identity oriented. Southers was not talking about ordinary churchgoers, but rather about the radical 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,…

Economy Yields Too Few Prophets

By Peter Laarman

…mployed workers for every new job opening. And as of last month the actual number of workers in crisis is not the 14 million who are officially unemployed (as if that number were acceptable), but more like 29 million people, if you count people no longer looking or working at sharply reduced hours or taking big pay and benefit cuts. That is 18 percent of the total workforce and still rising. What’s more, three-fourths of those losing work over the…

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

By Daniel Martin Varisco

…ges. Muslims, like members of other faiths, express their displeasure in a number of ways over those who belittle their prophet. In 2008, for example, a petition was circulated online to remove a 17th-century Ottoman manuscript image of Muhammad from the Wikipedia article on the prophet. Despite accumulating over 455,000 signatures and the Wikipedia community’s refusal to remove the illustration, still no violent acts have resulted. Lost in the de…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…ntry. 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 representative of atheism, and he told me he woul…