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This Just In: College Will Make You an Atheist

By Susan Henking

…ly to become more religious. But students majoring in biology and physical sciences remain just about as religious as they were when they started college. Of course, the article itself is not really about a causal link between either religiosity and choice of major or the impact of college major on religiosity. The article is about a set of correlations, developed through a study of 26,200 people and, as one odd assumption, the choice of business…

The Racial Politics of Atheism

By Sikivu Hutchinson

…the most to lose from the increasing crackdown on and medievalist rhetoric about abortion. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? One of the biggest is that non-believers are a one-trick pony, singularly obsessed with church/state separation and battling creationists. Again, the number of atheists of color has grown, but the atheist movement as a whole has not embraced the issues that people of color struggle with on a daily…

Year-End Best Books in Race and Religion in American History

By Paul Harvey

…in the twentieth century, to black “ethnic religions” such as the Moorish Science Temple, to state-sponsored surveillance and harassment of civil rights activists, and finally to the national security state and the racialization of Islam over the last generation. The result is a landmark work in the field, and the creation of a new paradigm that will initiate conversations and foster intense arguments. Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates Sp…

“I Worship Jesus, Not Mother Earth”: American Christian Exceptionalism and the Paris Withdrawal

By Jacob J. Erickson

…kson (no relation to this author) announced proudly on Twitter that his conscience was clear: “I worship Jesus, not Mother Earth,” he wrote. “He calls us all to be good stewards of the planet, but doesn’t mean I have to care about global warming.” Whatever he means by “good steward,” one might suspect that Erick Erickson heard the word “steward” and filled it with an image of himself and not the imago Dei or the first century Jesus who knew Hebrew…

A Boundary-Busting Memoir of Love, Mental Illness, and Being Muslim in America

By Haroon Moghul

…of How to be a Muslim, I’ve just gotten married, but I didn’t get to talk about that journey, about what it was like to fall in love again, or even just what it’s like to find your footing after a major failure, and how differently I look at the world today. If this book is about how I learned to find an Islam for myself, the next one would be what I think an Islam for the future could look like. Because while some Muslims are interested in the p…

GOP isn’t Pro-Life After All

By Patricia Miller

…d cruel restrictions like 20-week abortion cutoffs that are based on phony science, forced ultrasounds meant to humiliate women, and arbitrary waiting periods designed to inflict guilt in women who don’t necessarily have any. These measures are not pro-life. They don’t prevent abortion. They are anti-woman and anti-science and should be labeled as such and anyone who supports them should be rejected on those grounds. But any person who calls thems…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…experience of war and defeat. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? The first is that nearly everything that can be written about the Third Reich has already been written. Because of the vast and influential nature of Germany both before and during the Third Reich; because of the sheer scale of the Second World War; and because of the unprecedented number of documents preserved in hundreds of archives and libraries across…

Eclipseville, USA: The Birthplace of ‘Little Green Men’ Proudly Hosts The Point of Greatest Eclipse

By Matthew Bowman

…he little green men showed how terrifying technology could be. In her book about the event Geraldine Sutton Stith, Lucky Sutton’s daughter, wondered whether it was a “coincidence” that UFOs began to be sighted “after we dropped the bomb.” Her telling of her family’s story emphasizes one of the signature fears of the Cold War: shadowy forces beyond her family’s control disrupting their lives in ways they barely understood. “My daddy didn’t like how…

Oh My God…

By Gary Laderman

…say, a supreme being who created the universe, there would be no confusion about its proper usage. Unfortunately, universal agreement about its reference is impossible; anyone familiar with the history of monotheism knows that consensus around a shared understanding of God is a pipe dream. In principle, the three Abrahamic traditions pray to the same God. In reality, the differences within each tradition, let alone among the three, are vast, confo…

Old Politics, New Bedfellows: The Olson/Boies Challenge to Prop. 8

By Jesse Lava

…ome knee-deep in the stuff. Take the humble idea that schools should teach science in the classroom. Or that sex education should convey facts. Or that our government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Or, heck, that financial policy should be based on real-life numbers rather than the numbers that banks would like to pretend are real. We are at a point where it’s no longer clear that a large, vibrant conservative movemen…