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New Poll Reveals Jews May Be Open to Change in Israel Policy

By Benjamin Weiner

…hardliners are running neck-and-neck. The stakes are high. If President Obama attempts to take a harder line with Israel he risks alienating his Jewish base. At the same time, if American Jews are not willing to support the president, they risk a diminishment of their own political capital if he does it anyhow. The J Street data, if nothing else, indicates that there is at least the potential for collaboration between the administration and the Je…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ng richness of American spiritual life and its interactive balance with secular life. A publicly recognized, government sponsored observation of the complex religious and non-religious American landscape that doesn’t invite rigid polarization might well be something for which we could all give thanks… in whatever way each of us might do that….

How a Powerful ‘Ex-Gay’ Pastor is Chasing the Latino Vote

By Katherine Stewart

…errymandering and voter suppression a strategic imperative—and for a political candidate who appeals to the racism of many supporters. But the leaders of the movement can read the demographic future just as well as you or I can. Many of them understand very well that the electoral future of their movement is not ethnically homogenous. They can also see, as some members of majority-white American congregations cannot, that some of the fastest-growi…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…go in restricting the availability of contraception and perhaps other medical care of which they do not approve, remains to be seen. The most visible implication has been the way that the Right then used the third party principle to try to allow conservative Christian business owners to deny service to married same-sex couples, or those intending to be married. The argument (which is disturbingly similar to arguments against recognition of interr…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

At the end of last summer the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voted to amend its ordination policies to include gay and lesbian clergy who are in committed, monogamous, lifelong, publicly accountable relationships. The assembly also voted to recommend a process whereby those pastors who had either left the ELCA or been forced out for violating the now-defunct ordination policies could be reinstated to the active clergy roster. For p…

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…mental gymnastics. The Buddhist approach to the science-faith question is not the tortured intellectual affair as it can be for many, who strain to see how God’s action in the world can square with certain physical laws or with some detail of evolutionary theory, or who reject God altogether because God can’t be strapped to a lab bench and poked and prodded. It is so different from that. Buddhists spend their lives coming to see the world clearly,…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…e who knows me knows I’m a bit of a smartass and I make lots of mistakes because I can be stubborn or just clueless sometimes. That comes through in the book, I hope, not in an annoying way, but just in an ordinary way. Moreover, I wanted the book to have a certain feel to it, like you were meeting me for the first time and you, the reader, and I were stuck late at night in an airport somewhere while a storm grounded all flights and I just started…

The Episcopal Church ‘Takes a Flying Leap’ into Controversies Old and New

By Elizabeth Drescher

…alled to live and be and act? In this present context, how do we make Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age?” But an earlier statement about the “differentiation” from the actions of the General Convention insisted that “our action is not to be construed as a departure from the Episcopal Church.” Opening the Doors Too Far? The approval of a number of other resolutions unrelated to gender, sexuality, and relationships drew little media attention but…

Will Pope’s African Tour Change Attitudes on Divorce and LGBTQ Among African Catholics?

By Kaya Oakes

…n some of which mass is only held once a month. Additionally, life in America can tempt many priests who come there for seminary training into staying. The “abundance of resources” in America means that African religious orders struggling to train their men want to take advantage of sending them to America, but that comes at a risk. “Diocesan priests in particular,” priests who work for a bishop and receive a salary, instead of a religious order w…

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

By Anthony B. Pinn

…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 there…