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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

…his staff was aided by parents, make no mistake about that. In addition, a number of senior citizens are reported to have been injected with poison, but it’s impossible to determine how many. This leaves the problem of how many adults voluntarily drank the “Kool-Aid.” Suicide is, of course, called into question if they were surrounded by armed guards, though the guards themselves died at the end by ingesting poison. The presence of hypodermic need…

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

By Anthony B. Pinn

…e episode is marked by affirmation of problematic assumptions limiting the number of those who qualify as “black” by restricting what constitutes an acceptable relationship to dominant religious claims. For example, Dre wrestles with the origins of his daughter’s turn away from God, and concludes, based on a survey of his co-workers, that whites don’t believe and African Americans do. The implication is sure: belief in God is part of the cultural…

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

…, along with a more robust opposition from church leaders, could lead to a last-minute disappointment. The latest poll shows 78% of voters in favor of passing the amendment on May 22. That is a staggering number, considering that Irish voters only approved divorce in 1995, and with a margin of less than 1%. It also reflects how diminished the power of the Catholic Church has become over the past 20 years, thanks in large part to devastating sexual…

Forced Cremation of Covid Dead in Sri Lanka Further Marginalizes Muslim Community

By Andrea Malji and Amarnath Amarasingam

…020, there have been 146 Covid deaths in Sri Lanka with a disproportionate number coming from the Muslim community; despite making up less than 10% of the population, Muslims account for nearly half of the reported deaths. A Muslim leader in Sri Lanka informed the authors that the number is actually higher, and that 82 Muslims have died, with over 70 cremations. The cremation of the victims was carried out by the state without the approval of the…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…going to write a book that focuses on four correspondents to Frederick Douglass’ Paper. During the 1850s, Douglass’s paper served as the venue for some of the most sophisticated, smart writing out there, in the form of letters from correspondents located across the country. Almost none of this writing has been analyzed or reprinted. In order to make these letters accessible to the widest audience possible, my book is going have an openly accessibl…

The Family Research Council’s Mistaken Identity

By Sarah Posner

…adical 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, neo-Nazis, Christian Identity churches, the AN and skinheads.” The report called Christian Identity “the most unifying theology for a number of these diverse groups and one widely adhered to by white supremacists. It is a belief system that provides its members with a religious basis for racism…

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

By Daniel Martin Varisco

…at led to a boycott of Danish products, attacks on Danish embassies, and a number of deaths. Last month in the New York Times, however, Reza Aslan countered that the controversy over the cartoons has died out and that in any case, there never was any violence over them in the United States. I agree with Aslan that the novelty of the cartoon depictions, which were intended to irritate Muslims, has worn thin by now—the Saudis, to take just one examp…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…, 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 would. Yet here we are. There’s a philosopher at the UC Riverside I admire named Eric Schwitzgebel. One of his more popular theories is his theory of jerks, which he defines as follow…