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Scottish Episcopal Church Angers Conservative Anglicans With Embrace of Same-Sex Marriage; and more in Global LGBT Recap

…tation is wrong. Bulgaria: Pride activists, protected by police, vastly outnumber far-right protesters The leader of the neo-Nazi National Resistance planned a counter-protest to Saturday’s Pride march; last week he urged people to bring “brooms and shovels with wooden handles” to “cleanse Sofia from garbage.” Human Rights Watch has some history: Sofia Pride marchers have faced hateful rhetoric and violence in the past, and only tepid police prote…

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The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

…ier might well have declared, offering data on the correlation between the number of pipers in a village and the number of butts in local church pews. Across the pond in the American colonies, religion was not faring much better. In his masterful reconstruction of American religious history, Awash in a Sea of Faith (from which the previous anecdote is drawn), Jon Butler reports that Christianity was “in crisis” in the New World: Pennsylvania aside…

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Was Ghana Anti-Gay Scare Just Politics?

…ed “to get rid of these people in the society.” Some observers believe the number of sexual minorities may have been inflated in order to whip up opposition to homosexuality which could advance the standing of conservative politicians. Graham Knight, a British blogger living in Ghana, recently wrote that the claim of 8,000 sexual minorities has little support in fact. Knight concluded, in a blog post titled Did Ghana register 8000 homosexuals? The…

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Demonized and Demonizing No More.

…d between atheists and religious communities. Of course, there are still a number of people who are, if not entirely resistant to the ideas in the book, at least deeply suspicious about or don’t see much value in them. One thing I find valuable about Faitheist is that it moves atheism away from the kind of polemic that ends up focusing on truth claims in a very literal way and so mirrors the religious fundamentalisms it would like to dismantle. A…

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6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

…es patterns of imbalance, in the textbooks. While these problems spanned a number of religious traditions, I will discuss two representative examples, Christianity and Islam—the two religions about which the most heat was generated in the textbook debate. 5. Pro-Christian, Anti-Muslim Slant As I mentioned in item 1, the curriculum standards (TEKS) promote Christianity over other religions. Sadly, I found a similar pro-Christian slant in many world…

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Right Wingers Say “Gay” is Out, But Try Putting “Unnatural Vice” On a Bumper Sticker

…eny minority of people may take away their right to tell gays and lesbians that God will send them to hell for all eternity — out of love, mind you. But, then again, anti-gay Evangelicals have a right to be afraid. After all, researchers say the actual number of Evangelicals may well be “as small as 7 percent of the total adult population.” Which means Evangelicals know just how effective a small number of people can be at taking away the rights o…

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Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

…red with anti-critical race theory laws being passed for K-12 schools in a number of Republican states and further bills aimed at higher education proposed. What many will perhaps find more surprising is that the rhetoric being used by Campus Reform and their ilk is far from new to me or fellow researchers working on racial justice in American Buddhism. Rather it echoes some of the white Buddhist backlash to racial justice work. A number of white…

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Fasting and Faithy Friends of Convenience

…d the 2008 election; as I’ve argued before, he gained support across the a number of demographic groups, and it’s difficult to make the case that Obama won because he finally shed the Democrats’ (imagined) hostility to religion. If you’re a religious person whose faith compels you to favor government programs to support the less economically blessed among us, pulling the lever for McCain-Palin probably wasn’t in the cards. To add insult to injury…

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Don’t Call It “Prayer Shaming”: Our Moral Failure Exposed

…d Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA. In the aftermath of the attack, a number of Republican presidential candidates and elected officials issued tweets that, many have argued ad nauseum, demonstrated a commitment to public piety instead of public policy as a response to the massacre. In a rare moment, news and social media outlets in the U.S. became a forum for a surprising debate about spiritual disciplines—the meaning and import of prayer. L…

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‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

…. Simply identifying as an atheist at first felt uncomfortable to me for a number of reasons. All of my family members remained Christian, so it was easier for me to tell them that I was “searching,” or at least agnostic, rather than atheist. Additionally, I wasn’t sure that the label applied to me. Finally, now, as a historian of religion, when I introduce myself to strangers, they inevitably ask me about my religious commitments. When I explain…

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