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Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…st effect. There was modesty in these three men. Somehow, what they contribute was more important than what others might think about them. Few of those who want us to think that they are the next generation have such modesty, my friend Tariq Ramadan included. This is a difficult role to fulfill, and the general status of our community just about closes the door to such an option for a woman. We had better keep our focus on the matter of burqas and…

How Religion Shapes (or Doesn’t) Our Views on Public Issues

By Daniel Schultz

…jects Pew chose to poll. But go back and take a look at the list of voter priorities: 90% say the economy is a “very important” topic. 88% jobs, 78% health care. Get the hint? And that’s with a forced-choice list. If you asked respondents to come up with their own list, it might be even more lopsided. Preachers who want to know what’s on the mind of their congregations might want to think about that, as might anyone who wants to know what relevant…

For Conservatives, the Future Looks Dim… and Gay

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…d what they found doesn’t bode well for the GOP’s future. If young voters primarily thought the Republican Party’s policy plan in 2012 was to prevent gay marriage and to ensure very low taxes for very rich people. . . it’s understandable that a large majority voted the other way. . . . Opposition to gay marriage is a ‘deal breaker’ to one out of four young voters. And it’s not just the marriage issue. Younger Republicans don’t like how the GOP tre…

Religion and Resistance at the New National Museum of African American History and Culture

By Anita Little

…e country will be on view at the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Housed within the new museum will be the Center for the Study of African American Religion, a $10 million project that aims to further research on the inextricable role spirituality has played in black America’s past and present. I took a moment to speak with its recently appointed chief curator [and current advisor to RD’s “Remapping U.S…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…n in the 1963 case of Abington Township School District v. Schempp, known primarily for prohibiting public school officials from reading Bible verses to captive student audiences, though it also hinted at the possibility of constitutionally appropriate study of religion in public education: It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the…

“Real” Evangelicals Don’t Support Trump? Not So Fast…

By Neil J. Young

…politics, including his switch to a pro-life position, and disliked the thrice-married billionaire’s coarse style and spotty personal life. But Trump’s primary victories in evangelical-heavy states like South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, pushed that opposition into overdrive. And it’s also prompted evangelical leaders to mount a defense of their faith by tearing apart what they have called the “myth” of the evangelical Trump voter….

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…hostilities, and social marginalization. And as was true in New Orleans during Katrina, where those left behind were almost completely devoid of institutional support on which to lean, the urban poor in various contexts have suffered from what has also been a scarcity of institutional supports—including churches. The social storms that have ravaged vulnerable urban contexts have also impacted church life. In neighborhoods where populations have b…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…stian LGBT people to gay Christians to conservative and liberal straight Christians and non-Christian straight people—closing with these words: “If the church is to ever have an impact [on] today’s culture it has to start by giving up its power. We don’t win anything by using power; rather we are [here] to influence with love and service.” Therefore I ask you, Mr. Perkins: stop being a gatekeeper and start acting like Jesus. All of Jesus—not just…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…00-page tome, The Cousins Wars (1999). Phillips notes that the fiercest American revolutionaries by far were New England members of the Dissenting churches (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists) whose forebears, in the preceding century, had battled the proto-Catholic Stuarts back in the Mother Country. In the English Civil War, these middle-class sectarians, mocked as “Roundheads,” routed the aristocratic Cavaliers. They were driven to res…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…with some 1,000 comments, many of them negative. While there was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Dem…