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All the Lonely People: Holiday Blues and the Epidemic of Isolation

By Peter Laarman

…ms of social networking, of course. Text messaging reached an unbelievably high level this past year, with something like 740 billion text messages sent in the first half of 2009 in the United States alone. But also spiking ominously is nearsightedness among the young—a contagion of myopia that experts think may be triggered by the amount of time kids and teens spend (you guessed it) texting each other, but also glued to other screens, both small…

Fear Not, The IRS Isn’t Colluding With Angry Atheists

By Sarah Posner

…hes, the PARC has determined that as of June 23, 2014, 99 churches merit a high priority examination. Of these 99 churches, the number of churches alleged to have violated the prohibition during 2010 is 15, during 2011 is 18, during 2012 is 65, and during 2013 is one. As a result, FFRF wrote in its motion: Based on available information, FFRF and its counsel are satisfied that the I.R.S. no longer has an explicit policy or practice of not enforcin…

Scalia’s (Not Very Catholic, Right Wing) Originalism

By Patricia Miller

…. That Scalia was a devout Catholic is clear. He was a product of a Jesuit high school and university. He (along with fellow Court conservative Clarence Thomas) attended St. Catherine of Siena in the tony suburbs of Virginia, with its high Latin Mass and rumblings of Opus Dei. The only child of an Italian immigrant father and a second-generation Italian mother, he and his wife had nine children after playing what he himself called “Vatican Roulett…

What the Latest ‘God’s Not Dead’ Gets Egregiously Wrong — and Right — About Homeschooling

By R.L. Stollar

…straightforward racism. In short, they promote exactly the same teachings highlighted in We The People when the pastor of the homeschooling families goes on a rant about the United States’ allegedly Christian heritage. Another accurate point the film makes is that secular and other non-Christian homeschoolers are generally supportive of evangelicals’ libertarian approach to homeschool policy. In the movie, a diverse group of homeschoolers (parent…

The Politics of Anti-Gay Persecution: Gambia, Egypt, Jamaica, Russia, with a Helping Hand from US Religious Conservatives; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…discrimination. According to Pink News, the charter was to have been enacted on Human Rights Day – December 10 – but “after it picked up flack from church groups and conservatives, the planned charter was postponed indefinitely.” New Zealand: first gay judge on high court Matthew Muir has become the first openly gay member of the country’s highest court. Australia: Gay man becomes chief minister of capital territory Andrew Barr was appointed Chief…

The Man of Science vs. The Man of Faith: Richard Dawkins Spars with Stephen Colbert

By Byron R. McCane and Dan Mathewson

…the Bible-believing Man of Faith — is what Colbert parodied so well, as he high-fived his audience while making his way to the debating table/wrestling ring. Colbert pointed at Dawkins and declared, like a trash-talking pro wrestler, “You’re going down.” This, of course, is what Ham says every time he speaks (without actually saying it). Colbert then attacked his opponent with a flurry of empty arguments, dropping his opponent to the mat with the…

The Ex-KKK Priest and the Subtle Terrorism of the Anti-Abortion Movement

By Patricia Miller

…at Aitcheson was arrested in Reno, New York Archbishop John O’Connor led a high-profile march on an abortion clinic in New York City. Previously he had expressed support for Operation Rescue, which would go on to lead a series of confrontational abortion clinic blockades in Kansas in the summer of 1991. It’s also instructive that about the time that Aitcheson was burning crosses in southern Maryland and plotting to bomb the NAACP, a Catholic anti-…

Occultism and New Age Take Off in Iran: An Interview with Alireza Doostdar

By Alireza Doostdar

…s there anything you had to leave out? I had a good deal of material about high-profile cases of political sorcery. For example, there was a fascinating moment in the second term of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency when some of his erstwhile supporters accused him of falling under the spell of a sorcerer in his inner circle. In the end, I decided that these sections exceeded the book’s overarching narrative about science, rationality, and experime…

Sex Comes For the Archbishop: Rembert Weakland’s Unflinching Memoir

By Mary E. Hunt

…mpelling fashion. His early experience of going to a Benedictine monastery high school set him on a trajectory for quality education and religious leadership. Study in Rome and the chance to live there with confreres from around the world kept him learning languages and incorporating different cultural realities at a time when most Americans were just as monolingual and xenophobic as Europeans thought they were. He was elected to lead his abbey in…

God and the Gay Christian: An Interview with Matthew Vines

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ut now even people who basically know nothing about the law and any of the high level argument can make a very strong case for why same-sex marriage should be legal. That requires synthesizing the best arguments and letting them percolate and mainstreaming them. I think we’re a bit behind in the religious conversation. It’s not that this research and arguments aren’t out there, it’s that they haven’t yet been mainstreamed in a clear, accessible, c…