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Can Mormon Glenn Beck Unite the Christian Right?

By Kathryn Joyce

…f heavyweight Christian right groups, from the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and Focus on the Family, who network with representatives from the Vatican, Mormon scholars, conservative evangelicals and Catholics from developing nations, and a few Muslim leaders seeking allies to fight gay and women’s rights at the UN. The result is the spread of US culture-war tactics across the globe—from the Czech…

The End (of Religion) is Near, Scientists Say

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…what we who are educators or health care professionals grapple with on a daily basis? The number-crunchers are forcing us to speak their language and play their game, though they 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…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…ticians. Joseph Patrick McCormick at Pink News has that background: The civil unions bill came about after the European Court of Human Rights upheld complaints of discrimination by same-sex couples, who currently have no legal rights in Italy However, it has stirred up resentment between the LGBT community and the country’s powerful anti-gay Catholic lobbying groups – with large rallies and political manoeuvring against the measure. Vile signs at…

Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…romote low-performing charters in Michigan and in Detroit in particular. While billionaire fascination with charters (and here the interventions of the Waltons and the Broads make the DeVos family look like pikers) is well worth exploring and exposing, the steady advance of state-level schemes to fund religious education using taxpayer funds barely breaks the surface of media attention. State support for religious education takes many forms, the c…

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

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forb…

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

By Cody J. Sanders

…is the living, not the dead, who create the threat to public health. Some will still hold funerals under the recommended 10-person limit. Others will choose a direct cremation or burial without any rites, rituals, or ceremony in favor of a funeral or celebration of life at a later date (something many choose to do even under normal circumstances as part of a “convenience” storyline in the American Good Death narrative). Italy has banned funerals a…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…e, but then they’ll pass on and their families and friends will pass on until I will become just an anonymous name in a cemetery somewhere. There’s something sad about that, the anonymity of the people who lived before us, but there’s something beautiful about it too, how life just keeps going. We can all sometimes forget about that. I know I have. I know I have taken people for granted, but I try to be a little more aware now of the life around m…

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

By Elizabeth Drescher

…agine those without a formal, institutional religious identification or affiliation as necessarily being unbelievers. Certainly, we can see the sensationalism of the original RNS headline as it made its rounds as expressing some level of anxiety that this is the case. But the tenaciousness of this imaginary label seems also to extend to unbelievers themselves, who have often been just as quick as religionists to claim Nones as atheists, secularist…

Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…risk of cannibalizing already-established communities. And while the South changes more slowly than the rest of the country, it’s not immune to the rising tide of disaffiliation. That leaves reaching out to black folks and learning Spanish. The Southern Baptist Convention will have to start looking like the millenial South if they want to stick around. * I’m using data from The ARDA, which break down membership by state, but which apparently don’t…

Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection

By Jacob J. Erickson

…one to shame. Before us are pools of water, shrubbery, and larger bottles filled with a vegetable milk mixture. Suddenly, ten to fifteen baby elephants—the first group—come running down the hill for their food and bottles. It is seriously cute. And the crowd gasps and coos and takes as many pictures as they can manage. The orphaned elephants grab their bottles with their trunks, guzzling every last drop. They roll in the mud. They drink water. And…