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Taking On The Religious Right…In Kansas? Yes.

By Daniel Schultz

…ng to be a leader for all Kansans, so that we can continue our legacy as a Free State, where discrimination and bigotry – against anyone – is not tolerated.” Why is this so good (or at least why am I so excited by it)? Let me count the ways: It’s true. Check the Holland site for the citations, which are difficult to refute. Lou Engle has horrible politics. Brownback should have his judgment questioned for hanging around with him. More to the point…

Rewriting the History of Catholic Schools in America

By Marian Ronan

…ocudrama, God in America. The series explores the development of religious freedom in the United States from 16th-century Spanish Franciscan missionaries to the present day. Hughes, we learn, is a hero of religious freedom because, as bishop of New York, he saved most of the city’s 12,000 Catholic children from a life on the streets by forcing the state legislature to stop the mandatory reading of the Protestant King James Bible in the “common sch…

The ‘Common Sense’ Argument Against Marriage Equality

By Kate Blanchard

…r and their children.” (The infertile, asexual, post-menopausal, and child-free by choice need not apply.) Anderson echoes precisely what same-sex proponents have been saying all along with regard to children: that the desire to marry is in fact a desire to be more traditional. As Frank Bruni put it, gays and lesbians are no longer cultural rebels; “We’re aspirants to tradition, communicating shared values and asserting a fundamentally conservativ…

Will a New Dawkins Foundation-Sponsored App Help Atheists Talk to Believers?

By Alana Massey

…-escalation are all admirable, but as noted earlier the tone is not always free of condescension. Writing realistic dialogue for hypothetical conversations is a very particular skill, and several of the scenarios reflect a deep disdain for believers. At times, the app casts believers as belligerent doofuses: …or violent bullies: Another scenario assumes that you might be tempted to lecture an intoxicated panhandler about epistemology and divine ex…

Pittsburgh Paradox: A City Haunted by God and Steel

By Ed Simon

…thiest industrial metropolis in America, only to see its economy gutted by free-market orthodoxy—makes the region a metaphor for the nation itself. Which is what makes the spiritual implications of Pittsburgh’s meaning all the more important, because if we try and reconcile transcendence with grubby reality, we derive a poetics of the sacred amidst the profane, what I described in a 2015 essay in Belt Magazine as being a place of “strangeness and……

The Battle for the Meaning of Religious Freedom Day

By Frederick Clarkson

…ponse to this apparent effort to alter or obscure the meaning of religious freedom in the United States at its historical root, I participated in an effort, advised by experts and the staff of organizations concerned about religious freedom, to draft a model resolution that would accurately commemorate the core ideas and their centrality to our country’s approach to religious freedom. State Sen. John Marty (D-MN), who stared down a smear campaign…

Final (Probably) Thoughts On The Aqua Buddha Ad

By Sarah Posner

…enough to insulate him from questions about his religion. Rand Paul walked free from his Aqua Buddha past because conservative Christians think he’s a good Christian now, and others, like the reporter Jason Zengerle, who broke the story, think he’s just a fun-loving, anti-authoritarian prankster. (That’s the beauty of a conservative Christian Ayn Rand devotee — they can simultaneously embrace and reject God and get away with it, somehow.) I don’t…

Barack Obama, Pro-Life Hero

By Eric C. Miller

…g initiatives, conservative activists are finding they may apply religious freedom to any number of disparate issues. Apart from trivializing what ought to be a sacred liberal right, the widespread deployment of religious freedom arguments indicates a weak rhetorical posture. In each of the cases mentioned above, opponents of a particular piece of legislation embraced religious freedom only after other strategies failed to persuade. Such arguments…

Are Religious Leaders Prepared to Engage “Religious Liberty” Questions Post-Hobby Lobby?

By Carolyn Davis

…and the practice of family planning by both women and men. As an ordained United Methodist minister and theological educator, I speak with greatest familiarity from a place of Protestant religious leadership. However, I am of the firm conviction that most mainline religious leaders in the U.S. share commitments to pluralism, reason, and the free choice to exercise or refrain from exercising religious belief in this country. We must find ways to r…

Joe Miller’s Anti-Gay, Anti-Islam Advisor

By Sarah Posner

…ther Jones, Alaska Republican Senate candidate (and tea party favorite and free press abuser) Joe Miller had on his campaign payroll one Terry Moffitt, a radical Christian conservative activist from North Carolina. Campaign disclosures say nothing about what kind of “consulting services” the Miller campaign paid Moffitt $2,500 for, and nobody was telling Corn, who details Moffitt’s extreme anti-gay views, and his lambasting of Republicans who were…