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Church and State in Japan: The Case of the Yasukuni Shrine

By Mark R. Mullins

…d and deified, and are now worshipped as a kami (god), along with the Class-A war criminals enshrined several decades ago. Over the years, a number of individuals have made personal visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and requested that enshrinement be cancelled and the names of their family dead be removed from the shrine register. In addition to appeals from Japanese families, there are also Koreans and Taiwanese who have been dismayed and angered to…

Mormonism’s Black Issues

By Joanna Brooks

…l donations to the Proposition 8 campaign and a sizeable majority of its on-the-ground efforts.) The post-Proposition 8 backlash was, he stated, comparable to Civil Rights Movement-era “voter intimidation of blacks in the South.” Oaks, a former University of Chicago law professor who clerked for United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1957 and 1958 in the aftermath of the Warren court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education (1954)…

Cruz and the Evangelical Illusion

By Sarah Posner

…ut to some evangelicals, he is an embarrassment. Other attendees of the off-the-record Texas confab included, according to the Post, James Dobson, the retired founder of Focus on the Family and Richard Land, the former disgraced head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Dobson and Land are the quintessence of what one might call a “media evangelical,” someone reporters call on to gauge the pulse of a subcul…

Who Bombed the Boston Marathon?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…kind of movement that might be attracted to make its mark on a liberal anti-gun crowd on what many have noted is Massachusetts’ Patriots’ Day. The 26-mile course of the marathon was meant to honor the 26 victims of the Newtown school shooting, with a different victim recognized at each mile marker. Massachusetts, like Connecticut and several other New England states, has recently enacted tougher gun legislation and its representatives are strong s…

It’s Not About Cake: Anti-Gay Vendors Want a Constitutional Right to Discriminate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…eneral Jeff Sessions gave a fawning closed-door speech to the nation’s best-funded anti-LGBT hate group and legal nonprofit, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) asked the Supreme Court to review a second case featuring a business-owner who refused to provide wedding-related services to a same-sex couple. The facts at issue there, in a consolidated case out of Washington known as Arlene’s Flowers v. Ingersoll and Arlene’s Flowers v. State of Washi…

It’s Not Me, It’s You: Catholic Values Dumping Trump

By Patricia Miller

…lains some of the white Catholic “movement” away from Trump, especially vis-à-vis the evangelical vote. As a group, Catholics are both better educated and financially more well-off than evangelicals. But a deeper dive into some of the polling around the “Catholic vote” does suggest there is indeed something interesting afoot that counters recent electoral alignment trends. As FiveThirtyEight reported earlier this year, “Catholics who attend Mass w…

Dispelling the Zombie Myth of White Evangelical Support for Trump

By Robert P. Jones

…ttendance levels among White evangelical Protestants, America’s most church-going religious group, across the last decade. There has been a modest seven percentage-point uptick in the proportion of White evangelicals who seldom or never attend church (17% in 2023 to 24% in 2023), but these numbers are far below the proportion of the general population who have opted out of religious services (54%). And while there has been some fluctuation among t…

Why Religious Exemptions Matter

By Sarah Posner

…comment is the way the USCCB operates; rarely if ever does it issue an off-the-cuff assessment. But the USCCB’s allies — other groups that oppose the contraception mandate — have wasted no time in lambasting the new rule as an inadequate protection of their constitutional rights. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a legal group that has led the charge of litigation against the rule, claimed that the rule “leaves religious Americans at risk.”…

Gambian Prez Rails Against Gay ‘Evil Empire’; Irish Priest Comes Out During Mass; Trans Talk on Tunisian TV Sparks Debate; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…body and others if they knew what gay and lesbians did. “The offer of a one-to-one meeting with an inspector, who was a complete stranger to them, in order to discuss personal matters of sexuality was also viewed with alarm by some parents. “It is clear that many of the questions asked are viewed by parents as wholly inappropriate, particularly given the age of the children involved.” A spokesman for the Office for Standards in Education, Children…

The End of Trust: YouTube, Lies and Videotape

By Trey Lyon

…rk. The truth is, this video wasn’t made for my eyes—the tech-savvy, Google-happy, myth-busting Gen X-er who doesn’t trust the system. It was made for my Great Aunt. And for that matter, everybody else’s Great Aunt. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised when I’m typing away at the computer and I hear a Grandmother in the Senior Adult Sunday School class that meets in the Sanctuary say “Speaking of people, have ya’ll seen that video about the populatio…