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Why #FreeBritney is an #Exvangelical Cause

By R.L. Stollar

…Smit highlights how, “God’s proprietorship would have been theologically paramount in the young girl’s imagination… Always she was someone else’s, rarely her own person.” From Spears’ 2007 album Blackout. Like many evangelical children, Spears rebelled as she grew older—and often against religion. The artwork for her 2007 album Blackout, for example, includes images of Spears posing suggestively in a confessional booth with a priest. Whenever Spe…

Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

By April L. Bogle

…er own country, and has lent her considerable status to the grassroots India Against Corruption campaign as the movement evolves. What some are calling India’s Arab Spring has been more like a summer of discontent, complete with demonstrations and arrests, all in support of this epic fight against government corruption—what Anna Hazare, whose hunger strike made headlines, has named “India’s second freedom struggle.” I was glad to have the chance t…

Penn Jillette’s Signs You May Already Be an Atheist

By Steve A. Wiggins

…God, No! was published, to great acclaim. As of October it ranked #273 in Amazon’s book sales category. (Those of us whose books are ranked down in the millions can’t help but feel a little pang of jealousy; it does tell us, however, who is getting read!) Jillette is the vocal member of Penn & Teller, the bad-boy magician duo, and a noted iconoclast. Largely a ramble through his inner monologue, God, No! is the first book to cause me to laugh out…

The Religious Implications of Nudity

By Steve A. Wiggins

A TSA pat-down—security never felt so good! Or so bad. “But it’s against my religion,” I explain to the stern-looking officer who is directing me to the full-body scanner with a gaze that would stop Superman. I feel as if I have been profiled. A man traveling alone, looking like he has nothing to lose (people tell me I should smile more). It is a lazy weekday morning in the Raleigh-Durham Airport and I am returning from a business trip I didn’t r…

What the Lost Finale is Really About

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…efore the finale sinks in. What then am I offering in the midst of the hullabaloo? Why write before it is over? Why write at all? Because the ultimate response to the show’s questions have already been answered. The ending of the finale is (spoiler alert) not important. There are no answers that can be given that will leave anyone feeling satisfied. It’ll be like a Thanksgiving feeding frenzy: gobble it up and think we are satiated, but an hour la…

What’s More Frightening Than Snakes on a Plane?

By Devin Kuhn-Choi

…using to sit in their assigned seats next to women, indicate. Here on RD, Kara Loewentheil recently argued that the airplane demonstration but that it “replicates the broader social and political movement strategies we’ve seen on a personal scale,” and highlighted the similarities between these smaller-scale protests and religious employers protesting the Affordable Care Act under claims of religious freedom. While I agree with Loewentheil’s point…

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

By Kara Loewentheil

…lly in the person’s own best interests: you offer to pay your seatmate to vacate, or you claim that contraception is harmful to women. Third, if none of that works, you create costs for both the authority attempting to regulate you and the innocent bystanders around you in the hopes that if you create enough problems the authority in question will cede way (in other words you block the aisles for a 10 hour flight, or you file lawsuits and cost the…

The Right Wing Slant on Religious Freedom is a Slippery Slope

By Frederick Clarkson

…am, says that state funding of child-placement agencies that discriminate “against prospective or current foster parents based on the religious beliefs of the parents” violates the Tennessee Constitution. The slippery slope The legislation is a slippery slope—and the slope extends far beyond matters of LGBTQ equality that have received the most attention. While the courts have yet to settle the matter of where religious freedom ends and discrimina…

Trayvon Martin and American Exceptionalism

By Anthea Butler

…decided to hunt and kill Trayvon after muttering “These A—holes always get away with it” to the 911 operator. Zimmerman even calls Trayvon a “F’in coon” in the 911 recording. As of this writing, Zimmerman is not charged with any crime, courtesy of his friends on the Sanford, Florida, Police department reading of the “stand your ground law” which allows one to shoot if they feel threatened. Last time I looked, a pack of Skittles isn’t threatening,…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…d girls who swayed through those parking lots asking for change, and the “mamas” and “old ladies” minding the camp stove while 60-something-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows. Deadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights; Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with the…