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New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

…few countries around the world criminalize irreligion as such, many impose arbitrary burdens on secular manifestations of conscience that are not experienced by others. These include laws and policies regulating: • apostasy and religious conversion; • blasphemy and religious criticism; • compulsory religious registration, usually with a government proscribed list of permitted religions; • religious requirements or restrictions on government ID car…

My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

By Howard M. Friedman

…stian books: when the beliefs of a closely-held corporation and its owners are inseparable, the corporation should be deemed the alter-ego of its owners for religious purposes. Courts that have allowed businesses to assert the religious exercise rights of their owners have rarely, if ever, referred to the “piercing” cases brought by corporate creditors against business owners. This omission hides the unintended consequences that may be in store fo…

Dear White Evangelicals: A Black Square Ain’t Gonna Cut It

By Jhas Williams

…nd the only square that will prove to matter will be the one at which we started: Square one, where the little Black girl in a Christian school is trying to figure out why her braids “don’t meet dress-code” and a little Black boy has been told that his locs are unprofessional. For every joke about thick lips, ghetto names or dark skin; for the Nigerian student who, my Bible teacher remarked (with a slight chuckle), was “fresh off the boat”; and fo…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…at were once closely managed by the church. The resulting shift means that artists are more likely to resist the concept of grace than the concept of sin: their defiance of the holy is not in the tone of repentant fear so much as a kind of performative dismissal of the possibility that they too are beloved. They do not fear Hell so much as they wonder if they’ll like Heaven. But the absence of the church as an institution means that these reflecti…

Debate Heats Up Over “Francis Effect”

By Patricia Miller

…one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course n…

8: The Mormon Proposition Gets It Right

By Joanna Brooks

…spokespeople have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, usin…

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

By Diane Winston

…ans live on? Here in the U.S., religious fervor is at the center of a 30-year culture war that has debased civic discourse and rendered our nation ungovernable. Worldwide, religious sentiments have been mobilized to torture and murder. I understand that religion itself is not to blame; followers can distort religious teachings and politicians can cloak ethnic hostilities and turf wars in religious language. Yet even so—people believe that they are…

The Best the Largest Progressive Jewish Org Could Come Up With?

By Jay Michaelson

…ss universal, Jewish experiences. Ironically, this choice is at once too particular, and not particular enough. It excludes many Jews, and perhaps deliberately depicts Jewishness as a secular, American immigration narrative that is accessible to non-Jews as well – such as, importantly, readers of this publication. This is good for building bridges with the wider progressive world and with contemporary immigrant communities, and maybe that’s the p…