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Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…are winning in state after state. In the past six years, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Washington, D.C., and doubled the number of students currently benefiting from private school choice to 400,000. All told, together, we’ve helped more than a million kids in private school choice programs, and we’re just getting started. “Just getting started”: we should n…

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

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…r 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 conservatives in other quarters trying to be seen as the ones who care about the value of daughters. One can only assume that NRO folks ran these scenarios and determined none of…

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

By Cody J. Sanders

…f death? They will have died in an out-of-the-ordinary time―a kind of historical hinge point in our relationship to death and community. Could the unwelcomed ubiquity of death rupture our contemporary hesitation to discuss death openly, making death-talk less taboo? Rather than a typical American avoidance of any serious talk about death, will we turn toward one another in collaborative dialogue about end-of-life questions and advance directives,…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…scientific evidence for these things, there are thousands of years of historical accounts that suggest otherwise. Science is great. I love science. But science only gives us a layer of truth. There are other methods out there besides the scientific method that can tell us a lot about the world we live in. There is the historical method, the philosophical method, the theological method, the linguistic method. All of these methods give us a way of l…

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

By Elizabeth Drescher

…sifying and deepening the conversation on existential meaning-making in America today—the worthy core of Jacoby’s piece, as I read it—need not proceed by overwriting the perspectives and experiences of others who are quite likely, the available data tells us, to have very different outlooks. It is important, however, that we consider religious and nonreligious experience today in light of an emerging philosophical and practical in-between pointed…

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

By Daniel Schultz

…se members. In 2013, the SBC claimed 15,735,640 members, and in 2014, that number fell by 236,467 to 15,499,173—that’s a 1.5 percent decline. However, on this stat alone, the claim could be made that churches are simply clearing out the cobwebs and tidying up their membership rolls so their numbers more accurately reflect their active members. The problem is, membership isn’t alone in its decline—it’s joined by baptisms and weekly worship attendan…

Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection

By Jacob J. Erickson

…ng here, I recall a portion of the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay about Western writers, “How to Write About Africa.” He mocks the common sketch of elephants: “Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant…

To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

By Nyasha Junior

…r movement? The Black Lives Matter movement as I have experienced it has a number of queer black women on the ground doing the work. It also has trans women and trans men on the ground doing the work. They are part of the leadership. As you know the Black Lives Matter movement is a “leaderful” movement, and that is to say that not one or two persons are in charge of any action but that the movement itself very beautifully recognizes and utilizes t…

Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…

Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and Pro-Home Birth

By Katherine Don

…professor of medical anthropology at Oregon State University. The growing number of women seeking a secular midwife has created a gap in care, however. In some areas the preponderance of Christian midwifery, in tandem with restrictive laws, can make it difficult for secular women to locate a well-matched midwife. Anna Waterland-Dykstra, a nurse and director of community options at the Spearfish Family Planning clinic of the South Dakota Departmen…