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Behind a Recent Stunt in Idaho Lies a Dangerous Theocratic Movement

By Chrissy Stroop

…life Refuge in 2016. Having failed to gain the backing of the state GOP apparatus or of any state senators, the small group of extremist legislators ultimately admitted that they did not have a quorum. Nevertheless, they grandstanded and read the proclamation they’d put out claiming that Governor Little’s handling of the coronavirus crisis was unconstitutional, particularly with respect to the spending of federal money and the issue of contact tra…

Spiritual McCarthyism and the Catholic Vote

By Bill Berkowitz

In early April, before the Pennsylvania primary, the Obama campaign appointed a Catholic National Advisory Council—made up of elected officials, scholars, and activists and co-chaired by Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and several others—to reach out to Catholic voters. Less than a month later, Bill Donohue, the president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (and a…

The Pope in My Pocket; We Are All Dilettantes Now

By Michael A. Elliott

…he market of faith-based apps. There are several versions of iPhone Bibles available, and the sophisticated ReadScriptures app allows Latter Day Saints to highlight, bookmark, and search the entire canon of Mormon texts. Billed as “the perfect companion to your Halal digital lifestyle,” iSalat allows Muslim users to calculate the proper prayer times, wherever they may travel. One of the many available Jewish scripture apps, iTalmud gives the user…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…at they don’t like him at all. 29 percent of Americans believe President Obama to be an adherent of Islam, a religion that nearly one in three Iowa Republicans thinks should be illegal. (Perhaps because those Iowans took notice of this poll, the results of which seem to indicate that half of American Muslims support the imposition of sharia law, and nearly one-fifth justify violence as a means to this end.) Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surv…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…have taken March 14th to ponder geometry’s most popular constant. Pi (π), a number used to measure the circumference of circles, is approximately 3.1415. I say approximately because pi is a transcendental number, meaning that its decimal digits actually go on forever, unpredictably. As far as mathematicians can tell, those numbers never settle into any kind of pattern. This numerical lawlessness is quite the thorn in the side of human pattern-lov…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…recent demonstrations has focused on the events that have taken place in Lhasa, the capital of the “Tibet Autonomous Region” (TAR), but what is actually happening in Lhasa is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The media has been less successful at covering the protests in the Tibetan ethnic areas of Sichuan, Qinghai, and Gansu provinces on Tibet’s eastern frontier. Protests have even occured in Beijing. Taken together, these demonstrations—mo…

The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

By Patricia Miller

…complain that the media ignores the march, evidence of liberal media bias against the pro-life movement. As Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center told Washington Times in 2009: Anyone climbing on a bus from somewhere else, thinking they’re going to wave into a network news camera, is going to be very disappointed. In the last 20 years, despite large annual crowds, the liberal manufacturers of TV have simply never found the March fo…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

The Book of Mormon cleaned up at this year’s Tony Awards, winning nine of the 14 awards it was nominated for, including Best Musical. But tonight’s success is hardly unexpected, capping off, as it does, an extraordinary season of critical adulation. What’s going on? Why has a good-not-great religious satire from the creators of South Park received rapturous praise from the whole canon of media tastemakers? It may be true that The Book of Mormon i…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…or it), but the numbering. Instead of reciting the familiar arguments once again, we could simply call out the numbers to cue support from those on our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine s…

In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

By Luke Whitmore

…lions make their way up into the mountains of the north Indian state of Uttarakhand. Their destinations include the divine sources of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers, the abode of the god Shiva in Kedarnath, the famous residence of the god Vishnu in Badrinath, and the Sikh site of Hemkund Sahib, associated with Tenth Guru of the Sikh tradition, Guru Gobind Singh. This year in mid-June the monsoon rains came early and poured down upon the Land of the G…