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Fasting and Faithy Friends of Convenience

By Sarah Posner

…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…

6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

By David R. Brockman

…books I reviewed, but I did find the opposite: many presented Christianity more favorably, and Islam more unfavorably, than is historically warranted. (For the record I should note that I am a Christian.) Some texts soft-pedaled Christianity’s record of violence toward non-Christians. For instance, in the Pearson Learning middle school world geography text, the authors write that in the century after Christianity became the Roman Empire’s official…

Demonized and Demonizing No More.

By Joanna Brooks

…monized or rendered invisible are very liminal. What’s shifting is that as more and more attention is given to religiously unaffiliated populations, it has carved out a path for atheists. The data suggests that a significant majority of the religiously unaffiliated are not atheists, but the general public sometimes assumes they are. Increased attention to the unaffiliated is an opportunity for atheists to articulate ourselves and carve out a clear…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…orts indicate that about 350 congregations have departed to affiliate with more conservative Anglican Bishops outside the US. Whether the remaining congregations are better off or not will be decided in the coming years by members. At least we can return to all the fun Episcopalian jokes (of which they themselves are most fond): One day, after a Rite II service, an older female parishioner walks up to a friend and asks, “Did you hear about the n…

A Question for Hobby Lobby Supporters…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…

Oklahoma Bill Would Violate Basic Freedoms, Rewrite the Ten Commandments

By Andrew L. Seidel

…paring down what they claim is the holy word of their god to conform with modern morality, Walters and Olsen would do far better to read Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which we celebrate in just a few days. In it, Jefferson slams “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers … who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and mo…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…reventable disease, ecological concerns, gender issues, and human rights. “More and more you are beginning to see people seeing the social aspect of the Gospel, where Jesus himself went out and ministered and touched people,” he told me. “Going out and just preaching isn’t cutting it,” Mendies said. “We need a new interpretation of what Christ told us. The verse says, ‘the harvest is ripe but the laborers are few,’ and we tend to stop at that poin…

Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

By Amina Wadud

…each floor rose up to the third floor. There is also a partial 4th floor; more of a balcony over the deepest part of the mosque. Not a full circumabulation, so you cannot do tawaf from there, but you can do saiy. Fortunately for me, this toilet visit was from a place just next to the green line. The green line marks a distance in saiy where the pilgrim is supposed to run, because this is what Hajar did.* That way, when I returned I was not lost….

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

…opular public face. Robert Ingersoll, a leading figure in the Free Thought movement of the late 19th century, was at one time the most popular speaker on the U.S. speaking circuit. Ingersoll was well known for being a loving family man and an ethical leader in his community—as a public unbeliever. Though he criticized Christianity and religion in general, he did so from a place of sincere engagement with its ideas. And while he was a self-styled a…

What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

By John Stoehr

…hat matters. Important for you to understand is this: it’s impervious to democracy, morality, justice and the truth. If you want to keep this republic of ours, you’ve got to keep these people away from power. The commission The Republicans in the United States Senate filibustered this morning a bipartisan House bill that would have created an independent ideologically neutral commission to investigate the January 6 sacking and looting of the Unite…