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Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war veteran Allen West will be headed to Congress from Florida, despi…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…. How can there be an answer to why human beings suffer? There’s no good answer to that. There are only a series of bad answers: because it will all be all right after death, or because God knows better. That stinks. The only good answer to the problem of human suffering is, “I don’t know.” “I hope.” “Love unto death.” I would rather be in uncertainty than a false fixity, as painful as that is. To have an answer to meaninglessness, or to the myste…

‘Religious Freedom’ Rally Sets Stage for 1st Amendment Collision

By Sarah Posner

…peddled by the Catholic Bishops and their supporters. Nettina claimed the number of abortions increase with greater access to contraceptives, a trope commonly used to assert that contraception fails and therefore does not decrease the number of unintended pregnancies. This claim echoes statements made by the Bishops themselves, as well as anti-contraception groups, that birth control doesn’t work and is harmful to women’s health. Hagen recommende…

The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

By Paul Harvey

…futations of Barton’s bogus empiricism. I’ve considered these questions a number of times recently in observing historians struggling to deal with the popularity of figures such as David Barton, who bowdlerize history but get the kind of attention few actual historians receive for their work. To What Effect? These debates go back a long way. When I was in college at a Baptist denominational school in Oklahoma, the biology professor, a man about…

Prisoners In the Hands of an Angry God: A Conversation About Religion and Reform

By Andrew Aghapour and Stephanie Gaskill

…olls can have response rates as low as eight percent. (The study behind Newsweek‘s report was based on answers from the 386 Missourians who bothered to fill out a questionnaire.) Also, the methodological failings of surveys can yield results that are skewed toward researchers’ worldviews. But still, there is good reason to expect that religion influences a person’s prison politics. Prison reform, after all, raises ethical questions about justice,…

Warships, Animals, Pubs Eligible For Blessings From Church of England, But Not Same-Sex Couples; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…gious objections to performing weddings for same-sex couples, but not the “sweeping” religious exemptions that appeared in draft legislation that had previously been put forward by the attorney general. Croatia: Zagreb Pride warns of ‘increasingly aggressive’ rhetoric from ‘radical clerical right-wing’ Zagreb Pride urged the government not to give “tacit approval of violence” regarding a February 12 tear gas attack on a club hosting an LGBTIQ-them…

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

By John Stoehr

…commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection; the disproportionate number of Covid deaths in states run by Republican governors; this week’s shooting massacre in San Jose, Calif., and every other one like it; and, let’s see, what else? Well, feel free at the end of this piece to add your own examples. There are plenty more. All have in common the political concept that God divided the world between the elected and the unelected, that is, b…

Now That ‘Serial’ is Over: 2014’s Best Podcasts about Religion

By Andrew Aghapour

…it the You Made it Weird channel at Nerdist.com to pick from any of a wide number of fun and thoughtful interviews. For a crash course on Holmes’ own religious beliefs you can listen to this interview with Emergent Church pastor Rob Bell. Category Winner. When it comes to conversations about religion, Krista Tippett’s On Being is the gold standard. The Peabody Award-winning radio program is also available as a podcast, and subscribers can access u…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…g to identify potentially radical organizations and individuals. The Green Number, or Numéro Vert, is a private telephone hotline in France where family and friends can report someone they fear may become radicalized. And in the U.K., Prevent is a program that essentially creates ‘trigger warnings’ for teachers and institutions to report the potential for radicalization. I do not mean to condemn or even criticize these programs, merely to point ou…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…le from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popu…