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New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…tricts couched their discussion of biblical inspiration in the familiar terms of conservative Protestant notions of biblical inerrancy; as one district’s PowerPoint presentation explained: “Since God is perfect and infallible, an inspired book is absolutely infallible and errorless in its facts and doctrines as presented in the original manuscript.” Biblical Literalism Literalistic reading strategies often went hand in hand with claims of biblical…

Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…to be tested by the Tea Party’s mobilization, voter apathy, and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war vete…

Single, But Married To Jesus

By Anthea Butler

…other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Being loosed” could happen because the husband left because the wife was at church too much, they divorced, or the husband died. Others were in horrible marriages, often with physical and emotional abuse involved. Some never married. Yet the chu…

The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…world. On the other side we have the Vatican Library and the Vatican Museums, eminently modern institutions that have drunk deeply from the well of modern ideas. Museums, and the libraries that birthed them, are modern institutions, after all. These places—the Church, versus the Library or Museums—can seem like entirely different worlds, these days. I’ll have something to say about the Library here, and will hope to have more to say about Museums…

Harry Reid vs. Islamic Cultural Center

By Joanna Brooks

…t’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Philadelphia after Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter tried to extract a six-figure sum from the Churc…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…re devotional aids—focal points for inner dialogues with the deity, daydreams, wet dreams, wish-fulfillment fantasies involving fan and star or fan as star. Intimately situated in a teenager’s Fortress of Solitude (her bedroom), they’re domestic shrines, depicting the tutelary god at his most iconic, styled and posed and lit (if clothes make the man, lighting makes the god in celebrity portraiture and Christian iconography alike), then retouched i…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roo…

Raelians’ “Clitoraid” Met With Suspicion in Burkina Faso

By Joseph Laycock

…ercentage of women who undergo the surgery will be able to experience orgasms as Clitoraid, claims. But so far, Clitoraid has received much friendlier reception from media than its predecessor, Clonaid. In many ways Clitoraid is the perfect project for Raelianism, which regards human sexuality as the creation of benevolent aliens. A spokesperson for Clitoraid explained that female Elohim have clitorises and bestowed clitorises on their female crea…

Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

By Michael Bronski

…ing human relationships in the plural: as Christianities, Hinduisms, Judaisms, Islams, Buddhisms. This shift from singular to plural may sound odd, but is helpful when it reminds us that no religion is monolithic. What any religion means in the lives of its practitioners changes across historical periods, geographical locations, and in relation to other social forces. We can see this clearly in the case of Hinduism’s complex and changing attitudes…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…dding of a gay couple is counter to both biblical teachings and African norms and customs. Africa: Experts Hope Botswana Court Ruling Will Encourage Openness: Reuters reported on Tuesday, “United Nations and African human rights experts on Tuesday urged African countries and others around the world to lift bans on lobbying for gay rights after Botswana’s High Court ruled that a local group there had a right to be registered. The ruling last Friday…