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A Debate Rages in India Over Conversion, Secularism, and “Spiritual Violence”

By Murali Balaji

…as its ramifications beyond the country’s borders. As Pawan Deshpande and Padma Kuppa note, the discussion about ghar wapsi should be broadened to include the international implications of conversion politics in India. If evangelical groups are spending millions a year in coercively converting Indians (including right after natural disasters like the 2004 tsunami), then we should be having a discussion about the scale of conversion and the impact…

Can the Catholic Church Survive Trump?

By Patricia Miller

…ortion. The U.S. bishops’ long-term insistence that “all other moral evils pale in comparison with abortion, and therefore that all other electoral considerations should be squelched in favor of anti-abortion voting” has, writes Byrnes, pushed the Catholic Church into a tacit alliance with the Republican Party: …you would need to be willfully obtuse to not pick up on the message that the Catholic bishops, in their bulk, preferred Reagan over Carte…

Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

By Michael Schulson

…ion in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in th…

Indonesian Court Rejects Religious Conservatives’ Bid To Criminalize Gay Sex; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…conflict and new social movement theory, we highlight four strategies that participants use to negotiate the dissonance of living with conflicting identities in a context of religious homophobia: (1) privileging their Islamic identities and rejecting homosexuality as a legitimate sexual identity; (2) rejecting Islam and accepting homosexuality as a legitimate sexual identity; (3) interpreting Islam to be supportive of homosexuality; and (4) creati…

First U.S. Visit of the Virgin Mary Confirmed in Wisconsin

By Lewis Wallace

…nonized are not big-shot Mother Theresa types, but local heroes, many from past centuries. That’s why, for the most part, you’ve never heard of them. Bishops, archbishops and the Vatican do serve as arbiters of hundreds of sightings and miracles each year, addressing and mediating a steady stream of beliefs that arise around the world. Since the creation of new criteria for Marian apparitions in 1978, hundreds of sightings have been studied, and a…

How the Politics of the 1890s Explain the GOP’s Health Care Woes

By Patricia Miller

…inally broke through and gained control of the presidency and Congress and passed a number of historic bills, including the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which reintroduced silver into the currency supply, and the McKinley Tariff Act, the Republican attempt to modernize the tariff schedule. They also passed a long-awaited pension for Civil War veterans and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Democrats dubbed the 51st Congress the “Billion Dollar Congre…

Not a ‘Weenie-A** Lodge’: James Ray Trial Begins

By Johnny P. Flynn

…to say on the tapes, a statement he apparently held fast to as one participant passed out and fell and burned his arm on the red-hot stones. Ray asked him to come back into the lodge to finish the sweat. The trial finished its first week on Friday in Arizona’s Yavapai County. Ray is facing three counts of manslaughter and more than thirty years in prison for allegedly causing the deaths of Kirby Brown, James Shore, and Liz Neuman in an October 20…

Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

By Sarah Posner

…e current shari’ah scare. Former CIA head Woolsey, who served on the same CPAC panel as McCarthy and is also a contributor to the CSP’s “Team B” report, said at CPAC that the goals of radical Islamists are “roughly parallel to communists in the ’50s and ’60s… We’re in a war with terrorists but that’s not the end. We’re at war with those who want to impose shari’ah, this is our toughest fight.” It’s surely no accident, then, that President Obama (d…

Yet Another Survey Shows ‘Nones’ Growth at Record Levels

By Elizabeth Drescher

…re particularly, and by Chaves on “the congregational context of religious participation.” As this work unfolds, RD readers who self-identify as one or another variety of None are invited to share their own perspectives on religion, spirituality, meaning-making, and self-realization in my Nones Beyond the Numbers narrative survey.* *The survey results will contribute to three intertwined research projects I am currently conducting on the meaning…

Sovereign Grace Sexual Abuse Lawsuit Just Got More Complicated

By T.F. Charlton

…iendship and “personal integrity.” Both dismissed the posibility of any culpability on Mahaney’s part. The TGC statement, written by prominent pastors Don Carson, Kevin DeYoung, and Justin Taylor, alleged that Mahaney has been “the object of libel and even a Javert-like obsession by some.” T4G leaders Albert Mohler (president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), Mark Dever, and Ligon Duncan (who leads the Council on Biblical Manhood and…